The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 10

WHY THE EARTHWORM NEVER HAS NIGHTMARES

By the way, the earthworm, although he has his troubles like the rest of us, never _has_ nightmares. For one thing he has that stomach[11] and--a still better reason, perhaps--he never sleeps at night. Like the moths and the bats and the burglars and members of Parliament, he makes night his busy day.

[11] Just listen to this: "Worms," says Mr. Darwin, in that remarkable book of his, "are indifferent to very sharp objects, even rose thorns and small splinters of gla.s.s."

And, in other ways, while he is so much like the rest of us worms of the dust, his life differs from that of most people. For instance, he not only works by night while we work by day, and works underground while we work on top, but he takes his vacation in the Winter while we take ours in Summer. In that respect Mr. Earthworm is like the millionaires at Palm Beach; for in Winter he, too, goes in the direction we call south on the map--that is to say _down_.

But, as you say, it takes all kinds of people to make a world; including earthworms and millionaires!

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

Who was that in Mother Goose that went a-fishing "for to catch a whale"? Anyhow, there are fishworms so big that one might suppose they were made for catching whales. How long do you suppose they are, these big fishworms? A foot?

Pshaw! We have fishworms of our own a foot long. Two feet? More.

Three feet? More. You look it up in the article on the earthworm in the "Britannica."

And how many kinds of earthworms do you suppose there are? You will be surprised to learn.

Also, you will find that the earthworms have relatives who live in the water all the time.

The article in the "International" tells why these modest neighbors of ours don't come to the surface in the daytime. That will be an interesting thing to know. Don't you think so?

And did you ever count an earthworm's rings? Other scientists have.

(All live boys and girls are scientists; they want to _know_.) Try counting the rings of an earthworm and then compare your figures with those given in the article in the "International."

How many hearts do you suppose an earthworm has? You will find in the "International's" article they have a good many of what are sometimes called "hearts," and how different the earthworm's circulation system is from ours.

Does our saliva do for us anything like what it does for the earthworm; and our pancreatic juice?

Compare the earthworm's method of digging his subway with that of the armadillo. How do they differ in the way of using their noses?

Do you know how men dig subways; like those under New York City and Boston, for instance? Books that tell about this phase of human engineering and tell it in a very interesting way are "On the Battle-front of Engineering" ("New York's Culebra Cut") and "Romance of Modern Engineering" ("City Railways"), "Travelers and Traveling" ("How Elevated Roads and Subways Are Built").

Speaking of the earthworm's wedge and how he uses it, do you know that all of man's complicated machinery is the result of only a few simple mechanical principles combined; and that the wedge is one of the most important? Look up "_wedge_," "_machine_," "_simple machine_," etc., in the dictionary or encyclopaedia.

How does the earthworm's method of pushing his way in the world with the end of his nose compare with the way a root works along in the ground? (See Chapter X.)

The earthworm's neat way of disposing of the dirt he casts out reminds me of how the beaver handles dirt when he builds a ca.n.a.l, and the way of the ants in digging their underground homes.

(Chapters VI and VIII.)

We have little brains in our finger-tips just as the earthworm has on the end of his nose. How much do you know about the little brains scattered through our bodies (_Ganglia_)?

You see the simple earthworm is the A, B, C of a lot of things; and even Mr. Darwin's famous book doesn't contain all there is to be learned about him in books and in personal interviews with Mr.

Earthworm himself. A farm boy to whom the writer read the story of the earthworm, when asked how he thought the worm could turn in his burrow when it fits him so closely, said, "Why, he turns around in that little room at the end of the hall," thereby solving, as I think, a problem that puzzled Mr. Darwin, and which he left unsolved.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SINFUL TACTICS OF A SACRED BEETLE

The beetle pushing backward is the owner of the ball and is on his way--as he thinks--to his burrow. The other is altering the direction toward his own burrow. Fabre's book on the Sacred Beetle--the tumblebug of our fields and roadways--tells how the thing came out.]

CHAPTER VI

(JUNE)

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways, and be wise.

--_Proverbs_ 6:6.

THE LITTLE FARMERS WITH SIX FEET

I don't believe I've ever heard anybody say anything against an angleworm; although not many people, even to this day, I'll be bound, realize what a useful citizen the angleworm is.

But now we come to a cla.s.s of farmers that, as a cla.s.s, are positively disliked; farmers that n.o.body has a good word for, that n.o.body wants for neighbors. The charge against them is that, like the man in the Bible, they are always reaping where they have not sown; always helping themselves to other people's crops--bushels of wheat, bushels of rye, tons of cotton, loads of hay and apples and peaches and plums; and nice garden vegetables; and even the trees in the wood lot. It is estimated, for instance, that the chinch-bug helps himself every year to $30,000,000 worth of Uncle Sam's grain; while other insects make away with 10 per cent of his hay crop, 20 per cent of mother's garden vegetables, $10,000,000 worth of father's tobacco; and the Hessian fly sees to it that between 10 and 25 per cent of the farmer's wheat never gets to mill.

"Yes, and sometimes it's 50-50 between the farmer and the fly," said the high school boy, who often spends his vacation with a country cousin.

Then there are insects that injure and destroy forest trees because they like to eat the leaves or the wood itself; and some 300 kinds of insects that make themselves free with other people's orchards.

I. CONSIDERING THE ANT

But, as I said a few moments ago, it takes all sorts of people to make a world; and as there are good and bad citizens among men, so there are good and bad among insects. Indeed there are so many useful insects that help make or fertilize the soil by grinding up earth and burying things in it, that even this chapter, which is rather long, as you see, can't begin to tell about all of them. So suppose we give our s.p.a.ce to a few by way of example, and then look up others in other books in the library.

AMOUNT OF WORK DONE BY ANTS

First of all let us consider the ways of the ant (as the Bible tells us to). The ant's work may be said to take up where the earthworm leaves off. Mr. Earthworm, as we have seen, is a little fastidious about the kind of land he tills. Among other things, he is inclined to avoid sandy soil, while the ants will be found piling up their pretty cones of sand or clay as well as of black earth. And in some soils the ants do more important work than the worm that helped make Mr. Darwin famous. In the course of a single year they may bring fresh soil to the surface to the average depth of a quarter of an inch over many square miles. This not only helps to keep the farmer's fields fertile by adding fresh, unused earth, but enriches them by burying the vegetation--such as leaves and twigs and branches broken from dead trees by storms--so that it decays.

This burying of vegetation is the very thing the good farmer does when he spreads his fields with manure from the barnyard, or when he ploughs under the stubble.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HEAP OF GRIST FROM AN ANT SOIL MILL

Something of an ant-hill, isn't it? It is a foot high and measures nearly three feet across. You will find such ant hills in the Arkansas Valley in Colorado, where the photograph of this one was taken.]

Ants are very glad to do this for the farmer because it isn't any extra trouble for them. Their little heaps of fresh earth are thrown out in connection with the building of their homes. The mining ants dig galleries in clay, building pillars to support the work and covering them with thatches of gra.s.s. The red and yellow field ants are the masons. They first raise pillars and then construct arches between them, covering these arches with the loose piles of soil which we know as ant-hills. The carpenter-ants bore their cells in the dead limbs of trees, and the wood dust they make from them hurries on the process of returning these dead limbs to the soil. One kind of carpenter-ant covers its walls with a mixture of sawdust, earth, and spiders' webs. An ant in Australia builds its home of leaves fastened together with a kind of saliva. One kind of ant, whose calling card among scientific people is Formica fusca,[12] adds new stories to old houses as the colony grows; much as in the growth of cities and hamlets the buildings grow taller with the growth of the town. Just as men do, such ants first build the side walls and then the ceilings. As if these ants are working under contract and must get their job done by a certain time, two groups are employed on the ceiling at the same time, each group working toward the other from the opposite wall and meeting in the middle.

[12] In the world of science, the ant goes by her Latin name, _Formica_, and the whole family is known as the _Formicidae_. To a Roman boy _Formica_ simply meant "ant." _Fusca_ is also Latin, and means "dark"; so you can see this part of the story is about a species of dark ant. As a matter of fact he is dark brown.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DESERTED VILLAGE UNDER THE STONE

If Oliver Goldsmith had been as much interested in ants as was the French "Homer of the insect," Henri Fabre, he might have written of another kind of "Deserted Village," its "desert walks" and its "mouldering walls." This is a deserted village of ants. The little citizens that built it lived under a stone. When the stone was lifted it took the entire roof off the place.]