Mouth. Pharynx. E EARTH-WORMS. The important part played by earth-worms in the formation of vegetable mold has been made the subject of a special memoir by Charles Darwin. These articulates are distributed all over the world, being found in the loneliest islands of the sea, even in Kerguelen Land. There are but few genera of earth-worms, and they closely resemble each other. Lumbricus is the name of the best-known genus. The species have not been accurately distinguished and numbered; but only a part of them bring up earth in the form of castings, and are engaged in making tillable soil. They appear to be found wherever there is moist earth containing vegetable matter, but seem to abound most where the ground is loose and well charged with humus. Dryness is unfavorable and even fatal to them; but, although they are terrestrial animals, they have been found by M. Perrier to be capable of living for a considerable time under water. During the summer, when the ground is dry, and during the winter, when it is frozen, they penetrate to a considerable depth in the earth and cease to work. They are nocturnal in their habits, and may often be seen at night crawling over the ground, more often Calciferous glands. moving their heads and bodies around while their tails are still inserted in their burrows. Only sickly worms, such as are afflicted by the parasitic larva of a fly, as a rule travel in the day-time; and those which are seen dead on the ground after heavy rains are supposed to have been Upper part of in- creatures afflicted in some way that have died of weakness rather than by drowning. Esophagus. Esophagus. Crop. Gizza: d. testin. FIG. 1.-DIAGRAM OF THE ALIMENTARY CANAL OF The body of a large AN EARTH-WORM (Lumbricus), (copied from Ray Worm consists of one or Lankester in “ Quarterly two hundred almost Journal of Microscopical cylindrical rings or seg Society," vol. xv, new series, pl. vii). ments, each furnished with minute bristles, and is endowed with a well-developed muscu lar system. The mouth is provided with a little projection or lip, capable of taking hold of things, and of sucking. Internally, a strong pharynx, corresponding, according to Perrier, with the protrusile trunk or proboscis of other annelids, and which is pushed forward when the animal eats, is situated behind the mouth. The pharynx leads into the oesophagus, on each side of the lower part of which are three pairs of large glands, which secrete a surprising amount of carbonate of lime. They are unlike anything that is known in any other animal, and their use is largely a matter of speculation. They are probably partly excretions of the excess of lime contained in the leaves which the animal eats, and may otherwise aid digestion by affording a neutralizing agent against the acids of its food. In most of the species the oesophagus is enlarged into a cup in front of the gizzard. The latter organ is lined with a smooth, thick, chitinous membrane, and is surrounded by weak longitudinal but powerful transverse muscles. Grains of sand and small stones, from one twentieth to a little more than one tenth of an inch in diameter, may be found in the gizzard and intestines, and are supposed to serve, like millstones, to triturate the food. The gizzard opens into the intestine, which presents a peculiar remarkable longitudinal involution of the walls, by which an extensive absorbent surface is gained. The circulatory system is well developed. Breathing is performed through the skin, without special respiratory organs. The nervous system is fairly developed, with two almost confluent cerebral ganglia situated near the anterior end. Worms have no eyes, and are measurably indifferent to light; yet they can distinguish night from day, and are quickly affected by a strong light, and after some time by a moderate light shining continuously upon them. They do not much mind a moderate radiant heat, but are sensitive to cold. They have no sense of hearing, but are extremely sensitive to vibrations in any solid object. Worms in pots, which had paid no attention to the sound of a piano, when placed on the piano instantly drew into their holes when the notes were struck. Their whole body is sensitive to contact, as of a puff of air. Their sense of smell is feeble, but responds fairly well to the odor of the cabbage and onion or whatever they like. They are omnivorous, and swallow enormous quantities of earth, out of which they extract any digestible matter which it may contain; they also consume decayed and fresh leaves and vegetable matter, and raw, roasted, and decayed meat, but like raw fat best. Mr. Darwin discovered in worms evidences of a degree of intelligence. They line their burrows with leaves as a protection, it is supposed, against the cold of the clammy ground, and plug the entrances to them with leaves and leaf-stalks. It requires some manipulation to get these leaves in right, but the worms know how to perform it, and can discriminate between the easiest way to draw the leaf in and other ways. When they can not obtain leaves, petioles, sticks, etc., with which to plug up the mouths of their burrows, they often protect them by little heaps of stones; and such heaps of smooth, rounded pebbles may often be seen in gravel-walks. Their strength is shown by their often displacing stones in a well-trodden gravel-walk, a task that sometimes demands considerable effort. castings may be seen in garden-walks piled up in towers of greater or less height around the burrows. The towers formed by a naturalized East Indian worm, at Nice, France, which are sometimes distributed as thickly as five or six to a square foot, are built to a height of from two and a half to three inches. The tower of a perichaeta in the Botanic Garden of Calcutta, of which Fig. 2 is an exact representation, measured three and a half inches high and 1.35 inch in diameter. Some of the towers, as the figure shows, exhibit a considerable degree of skill in their construction. The castings are not always ejected on the surface of the ground, but are often lodged in any cavity that may be met in burrowing. The burrows run down, sometimes perpendicularly, generally a little obliquely, to a depth of three, six, and even eight feet, and are usually lined with a thin layer or plaster of fine, dark-colored earth which the animals have voided, in addition to which a lining is made, near the mouths, of leaves, also plastered. Bits of stones and seeds are also sometimes found in the bottom of the burrows, having been taken down apparently with a purpose. The amount of earth brought up by worms from beneath the surface has been carefully estimated by observing the rate at which stones and other scattered objects on top of the ground are buried. A piece of waste, swampy land, which was inclosed, drained, plowed, harrowed, and thickly covered with burned marl and cinders, and sowed with grass, in 1822, fifteen years afterward presented the appearance, where holes were dug into it, shown by Fig. 3, the scale of which is half that of nature. Beneath a sod an inch and a half thick was a layer of vegetable mold, free from fragments of every kind, two and a half inches thick. Under this was another layer of mold, an inch and a half thick, full of fragments of burned marl, fragments of coalcinders, and a few white-quartz pebbles. Beneath this layer, and at a depth of four and a half inches from the surface, the original black, peaty, sandy soil with a few quartz pebbles was encountered. Six and a half years afterward this field was re-examined, and the fragments were found at from four to five inches below the surface, having been covered in that time with an inch and a half more of mold. The average annual increase of thickness for the whole period was 19 of an inch. This was less than the average increase of thickness in some other fields similarly observed, in which the accumulation amounted to 21 and 22 of an inch annually. Another field, which was known as "the stony field," and in which the stones lay so thick that they clattered as one ran down the slope of the hill, became so covered with mold in thirty years that a horse could gallop over the compact turf from one end of the field to the other, and not strike a stone with his shoes. A flagged path in Mr. Darwin's garden disappeared, in the course of years, under an inch of mold with which the worms covered it. below the general level, while the surface of the field for about nine inches around it sloped up toward it A to the height of four inches above the surrounding ground close to the stone. (Fig. 4.) B D When the stone was removed, an exact cast of its lower side, forming a shallow crateriform hollow, was left, the inner surface of which, except where the base had been in contact with brick rubbish, consisted of fine black mold. The turf-covered border, which sloped up to the stone, consisted of fine vegetable mold, in one part seven inches thick, and was evidently derived from worm-castings, several of which had been recently ejected. This stone would have sunk to the level of the field in two hundred and forty-seven years if none of the castings were washed away by rains. Some of the fallen stones at Stonehenge have become buried to a moderate depth in the ground, and are surrounded by sloping borders of turf, on which recent castings have been seen. FIG. 3.-SECTION, REDUCED TO HALF THE NATURAL SCALE, OF THE VEGETABLE MOLD IN A FIELD, DRAINED AND RECLAIMED FIF- The estimates of the amount of TEEN YEARS PREVIOUSLY. A, turf; B, vegetable mold without any stones; C, mold with fragments of burned marl, coal-cin- mold brought up by the worms, ders, and quartz-pebbles; D, sub-soil of black, peaty sand, with based on actual weighings and measquartz-pebbles. urements of the castings at particular spots, give results ranging from 7:56 to 18.12 tons per acre in one year, and a volume sufficient to make when spread out a layer of soil of from one to more than two inches thick in ten years. The remains of ancient buildings seem also to have been buried effectively, in large part, through the action of worms. An example of this kind is furnished at Abinger, A stone, sixty-four inches long, seventeen inches broad, and from nine to ten inches thick, part of the ruins of a lime-kiln that had been torn down thirty-five years before, lay in a field, its base sunk from one to two inches FIG. 4.-TRANSVERSE SECTION ACROSS A LARGE STONE WHICH HAD LAIN ON A GRASS-FIELD FOR THIRTY-FIVE YEARS. A A, general level of the field. The underlying brick rubbish has not been represented. Scale, one half inch to one foot. Surrey, where the remains of an ancient Roman villa were discovered in 1877. The cut (Fig. 5) represents the appearance presented by the buried wall and the ground around it at a point where one of the trenches was dug. The mold here was from eleven to sixteen inches thick over the tesselated floor, G, and from thirteen to fifteen inches thick over the broken summit of the wall, W. No signs of worms appeared on the trodden-down earth over the tessera when they were first cleared, but many signs of fresh worm-action were seen on the next day, and for the next seven weeks these signs were very abundant. Numerous burrows were also found in the course of the digging, and worms were brought up from a considerable depth. Three years afterward the worms were still at work, burrowing in the concrete floor and the mortar of the walls. Other striking examples of the action of worms are found in the ruins of the old Roman town of Silchester, where the concrete floor of the basilica, still covered here and there with tessera, is found at three feet below the surface. Worm-castings were observed on the floors of several of the rooms, in one of which the tesselation was unusually perfect. Open worm-burrows were found beneath all the FIG. 5.-SECTION THROUGH THE FOUNDATIONS OF A BURIED ROMAN VILLA AT ABINGER. A A, vegetable mold; B, dark earth full of stones, thirteen inches in thickness; C, black mold; D, broken mortar; E, black mold; FF, undisturbed sub-soil; G, tesseræ; H, concrete; I, nature unknown; W, buried wall. FIG. 6.-A NORTH AND SOUTH SECTION THROUGH THE SUBSIDED FLOOR OF A CORRIDOR PAVED WITH TESSERÆ (Silchester). Outside the broken-down bounding walls, the excavated ground on each side is shown for a short space. Nature of the ground beneath the tessere unknown. Scale, vegetable mold must pass through them every few years. By triturating this earth, by subjecting its minerals to the action of the humus acids, and by periodically exposing the mold to the air, they prepare the ground in an excellent manner for the growth of fibrous-rooted plants and for seedlings. The bones of dead animals, the harder parts of insects, the shells of landmollusks, leaves, twigs, etc., are before long all buried beneath the accumulated castings of worms, and are thus brought in a more or less decayed state within reach of the roots of plants. Leaves are digested by them and converted into humus. Their burrows, penetrat ing to a depth of five or six feet, are believed to aid materially in the drainage and ventilation of the ground. They also facilitate the downward passage of roots of moderate size, which are nourished by the humus with which the burrows are lined. Many seeds owe their germination to having been covered by castings; others, buried more deeply, lie dormant till they are brought under conditions favorable to germination. ECUADOR (REPÚBLICA DEL ECUADOR). Particulars relating to area, territorial division, population, etc., of this republic will be found in our volumes for 1873 and 1878. The President is General Ignacio de Veintemilla, inaugurated in December, 1876, and declared dictator for an unlimited period in 1878. The First Designado (or Vice-President) was Señor L. Salvador; the Second Designado (or Second Vice-President), Señor J. Novoa; and the Cabinet was composed of the following ministers: Interior and Foreign Affairs, General C. Bernaza; Finance and Public Works, Dr. Martin de Icaza; War and Marine, Colonel F. Boloña. The Governor of Guayaquil was General J. Sanchez Rubio. No official returns having been published for a number of years past, it is impossible to give an exact statement of the revenue and expenditure of this distracted country. The former seldom, if ever, exceeds $2,500,000; while the latter rarely falls short of $3,500,000! More than one half of the entire revenue is derived from the custom-house of Guayaquil. The total national debt of Ecuador amounted to $11,459,000, including the British loan, the particulars concerning which, and the probabilities as to its extinction, are set forth in the subjoined report of the proceedings at a meeting of the bondholders: Mr. Hyde Clarke (the secretary to the Council of Foreign Bondholders) having read the notice convening the meeting, the Right Hon. E. P. Bouverie stated that the requisitionists were very largely interested in this debt, and their desire was to obtain the sanction of the meeting to a resolution proposing the basis of an arrangement which they hoped might be effected with the state of Ecuador for the purpose of settling the debt. There was a committee of Ecuadorian bondholders, which had sat at the offices of the corporation for some years, and they had fully approved the object of the meeting. The debt was a very old-standing affair. He believed it arose originally from the partition of the ancient Colombian debt, about fifty years ago, between the different states which were then split up out of the old state of Colombia, which had incurred the debt in the wars with Spain. Ecuador paid interest on this debt to a small extent for about twelve or thirteen years, under an arrangement made so long ago as 1854. It then suspended payment, and he believed an act of Congress was passed shortly afterward repudiating the debt. They hoped, however, that a better tone and temper was springing up on the part of the states of South America, indications of which he had found during his experience in that office, and they hoped that that spirit had extended to the Government of Ecuador. At any rate, the requisitionists thought they saw their way to effect an arrangement which would be advantageous to themselves and to the bondholders generally. A short time ago they had deputed a gentleman to go out to Ecuador and communicate with the Government, with the view of effecting an arrangement which they thought might be submitted to the bondholders. That, however, had not yet been done, for this reason, he understood that the President of the republic, who was more or less a dictator, but who to a certain extent held his authority and power with the consent of the representative Congress in that country, had said that it was useless for him to propose an arrangement for the acceptance of the Congress, however much he might desire it, unless he received some indication that it would be accepted by the bondholders, as, in the event of its rejection by them after he had induced the Congress tion. That seemed to him (the chairman) not an unto approve an arrangement, he would damage his posireasonable view, and he believed that the object of the meeting was to see whether they could not agree to a resolution laying down the pecuniary basis on which some such arrangement could be come to as would be acceptable generally. Mr. Robert Campbell, one of the requisitionists, then moved a resolution expressing the readiness of the bondholders to accept an arrangement of the debt which would adequately secure to them, in lieu of their present bonds and arrears of interest, not less than £950,000 new sterling bonds, with interest payable in sterling in London, of not less than 5 per cent, with a sinking fund of 1 per cent accumulative, to be increased after five years to 2 per cent. The re-establishment of the credit of Ecuador on the European bourses would, he continued, be to the great advantage of the Ecuadorian people, and would enable them to develop the immense virgin resources of the country. The large proposed reduction of the debt would show them that the bondholders desired to meet them in a liberal spirit. Dr. Wild having seconded the motion, Mr. F. Bennoch thought it advisable to state the precise condition of the debt at the present moment, in order that the bondholders might understand the position they now occupied, and that in which they would be placed in the event of the terms of the resolution being accepted by the Ecuadorian Government. The chairman replied that the present principal of the debt, as arranged in 1854, was £1,824,000, bearing 1 per cent interest, with the possibility of a rise in the event of the yield of the Guayaquil custom-house exceeding $400,000 a year. They, however, never received any increase over the 1 per cent, which, as he had stated, they had received for a few years only. The arrears of interest amounted to £264,480 (29 coupons). Therefore, the indebtedness was £2,088,000, which it was proposed should be converted into £950,000 of new 5 per cent bonds. The composition would, therefore, be nearly 108. in the pound. The amount required under the new arrangement would be £47,500 a year. Mr. Campbell pointed out that that amount was to be made by a population of over 1,000,000. Mr. Wright (of the Ecuadorian Bondholders' Committee) observed that when the old arrangement was made the bondholders were entitled to 25 per cent of the customs' dues, which he understood from Mr. Hazlewood amounted last year to £200,000. Therefore last year the bondholders should have received £50,000. The progress of the South American republics was, he said, stopped by the position of their debts, and if they were arranged their immense natural resources could be developed. It was to be hoped that if the Ecuadorian Government came to an arrangement with the bondholders, they would keep it this time. Mr. Van Raalte having alluded to a sum of £11,000 which, he said, was now in the Bank of England belonging to the bondholders, Mr. Hazlewood referred to his visit to the country a few years ago on behalf of the bondholders, and expressed his belief that the Government of Ecuador would acquiesce in the terms submitted in the resolution. A bondholder stated that the President and ministers had offered to give the salt-duties, which were now £50,000 a year, and could be developed to £70,000, as security for any new arrangement. The chairman then put the resolution, and declared it carried unanimously. |