HAMILTON FISH.
All of which is respectfully submitted.
COMIC ZOOLOGY.
ORDER, REPTILIA.—WORMS.
Worms are invertebral animals; in other words, they are backboneless, but nevertheless some of them—for example the prickly caterpillars—are full of spines. In Texas they call a chicken-snake seven feet long a worm; but it would be just as reasonable to call the Rosse Telescope an opera-glass.
The common earthworm is the most unfortunate variety of the species. Beaks are always after him, and he is often taken up early in the morning while lying perdue in the moist meadow grass. Earthworms are a good bait for trout, but the highflyers of the gentle craft consider it infra dig to dig them. Impaled on a hook, they are as lively as if on a bender, and if thrown, in this condition, into a stream or pool, the fish are apt to mistake them for their natural Grub. When quickly drawn from the liquid element by the angler, they sometimes come up with a single drop of water hanging to them, and sometimes—though more rarely—with two Gills. The question whether the hook hurts them, or only tickles till they squirm, is one of those knotty problems that physiologists have failed to solve. COWPER, the poet, had a tenderness for the earthworm. So also had IZAAK WALTON, who recommends that he be skewered "tenderly, as if you loved him."
From the cradle to the grave, and even after we are deposited in the latter, our bodies are liable to be infested with worms. There is the trichina spiralis, which really exists, although the German pork-butchers denounce the story as a "pig lie;" the ordinary intestinal worm, which disports itself, eel-like, in the Alimentary Canal; and the tape worm, of two varieties, one of which performs its circumlocutory antics in the human stomach, and the other in the government Bureaux at Washington. The worm that feeds on the cold meat of humanity, although the most insignificant of reptiles, has one attribute of Diety. It is no respecter of persons, and would as lief pick a bone in a royal vault as in POTTER'S Field. All flesh is the same to it—unless saturated with carbolic acid. It is said that all living things are propagated—that the process of creation ceased ages ago; yet it is quite certain that the worms known as maggots may be created by a blow. The most detestable of all the vermicular tribe is the Worm of the Still, which is a sort of caterer for the worm which never dieth—a reptile of another sphere, that has never been described in Natural History. The only worm recognized as edible by civilized man is produced in Italy and vulgarly known as wormy-chilly. The subject is susceptible of further expansion, but having run it into the ground, we here break it off.