beneath a flaccid cabbage leaf tried to drag it away; for the surface of
the leaf directly over the end of the worm s body became deeply pitted.
On another occasion a worm suddenly lost its hold on a flat leaf; and the
anterior end of the body was momentarily seen to be cup-formed. Worms
can attach themselves to an object beneath water in the same manner; and
I saw one thus dragging away a submerged slice of an onion-bulb.
The edges of fresh or nearly fresh leaves affixed to the ground were
often nibbled by the worms; and sometimes the epidermis and all the
parenchyma on one side was gnawed completely away over a considerable
space; the epidermis alone on the opposite side being left quite clean.
The veins were never touched, and leaves were thus sometimes partly
converted into skeletons. As worms have no teeth and as their mouths
consist of very soft tissue, it may be presumed that they consume by
means of suction the edges and the parenchyma of fresh leaves, after they
have been softened by the digestive fluid. They cannot attack such
strong leaves as those of sea-kale or large and thick leaves of ivy;
though one of the latter after it had become rotten was reduced in parts
to the state of a skeleton.
Worms seize leaves and other objects, not only to serve as food, but for
plugging up the mouths of their burrows; and this is one of their
strongest instincts. They sometimes work so energetically that Mr. D. F.
Simpson, who has a small walled garden where worms abound in Bayswater,
informs me that on a calm damp evening he there heard so extraordinary a
rustling noise from under a tree from which many leaves had fallen, that
he went out with a light and discovered that the noise was caused by many
worms dragging the dry leaves and squeezing them into the burrows. Not
only leaves, but petioles of many kinds, some flower-peduncles, often
decayed twigs of trees, bits of paper, feathers, tufts of wool and
horse-hairs are dragged into their burrows for this purpose. I have seen
as many as seventeen petioles of a Clematis projecting from the mouth of
one burrow, and ten from the mouth of another. Some of these objects,
such as the petioles just named, feathers, &c., are never gnawed by
worms. In a gravel-walk in my garden I found many hundred leaves of a
pine-tree (_P. austriaca_ or _nigricans_) drawn by their bases into
burrows. The surfaces by which these leaves are articulated to the
branches are shaped in as peculiar a manner as is the joint between the
leg-bones of a quadruped; and if these surfaces had been in the least
gnawed, the fact would have been immediately visible, but there was no
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