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Show 58 llABITS OF WORMS. OnAP. II. digestive fluid. They cannot attack such strono- leaves as those of sea-kale or large and B1ick 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 ~nly to serve as food, but for pluggin~ up t·he mouths of their burrows ; aud tlus 18 one of their strongest instincts. They sometimes work so energetically that Mr. D. F. Simpson, who has a small walled garden where worms abound iu 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-pedunc. les, 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 Cle1natis projecting from the n1outh of one burrow, and ten from the CIIAP. II. PROTECTION OF 'l'liEIR BURROWS. 59 mouth of another. Some of these objects, such as the petioles just named, feathers, &c., are never gnawed by worms. In a gravelwalk in my garden I found many hundred leaves of a pine-tree ( P. austriaca or nigri~ oans) drawn by their bases into burrnws. The surfaces by which these leaves are articulated to the branches are shaped in as peculiar a manner as is the joint between the legbones of a quadruped; and if these surfaces had been in the least gnawed, the fact would have been immediately visible, but there was no trace of gnawing. Of ordinary dicotyledonous leaves, all those which arc dragged into burrows are not gnawed. I have seen as many as nine leaves of the lime-tree drawn into the same burrow, and not nearly all of them had been gnawed; but such leaves may serve as a store for future consumption. Where fallen leaves are abundant, many more are sometimes collected over the mouth of a burrow than can be used, so that a small pile of unused leaves is left like a roof over those which have been partly dragged in. , A leaf in being dragged a little way into |