Thus eminently serviceable as the worm is, it yet becomes the prey of various orders of the animal creation, and perhaps is a solitary example of an individual race being subjected to universal destruction. The very emmet seizes it when disabled, and bears it away as its prize: it constitutes throughout the year the food of many birds; fishes devour it greedily; the hedgehog eats it; the mole pursues it unceasingly in the pastures, along the moist bottoms of ditches, and burrows after it through the banks of hedges, to which it retires in dry seasons: secured as the worm appears to be by its residence in the earth from the capture of creatures inhabiting a different element, yet many aquatic animals seem well acquainted with it, and prey on it as a natural food, whenever it falls in their way; frogs eat it; and even the great water-beetle (ditiscus marginalis) I have known to seize it when the bait of the angler, and it has been drawn up by the hook. Yet notwithstanding this prodigious destruction of the animal, its increase is fully commensurate to its consumption, as if ordained the appointed food of all; and Reaumur computes, though from what data it is difficult to conjecture, that the number of worms lodged in the bosom of the earth exceeds that of the grains of all kinds of corn collected by man. Worms, generally speaking, are tender creatures, and water remaining over their haunts for a few days drowns them; they easily become frozen, when a mortification commences at some part, which gradually consumes the whole substance, and we find them on the surface a mucilaginous mass: and their retiring deeper in the soil is no bad indication of approaching cold weather; but no sooner is the frost out of the earth, than they approach the surface to feed on decayed vegetable matter. Greatly beneficial as these creatures are, by drawing leaves and decayed matters into the earth, where their dissolution is accomplished, yet they are sad tormentors to us gardeners, and occasion the loss of more young plants than even the slug, by drawing in the leaf, which throws out the root; so that in the morning we find our nursling inverted. It is the same propensity, or ordination, for removing decayed matters, that influences them in these actions; as they are the faded leaves that are seized by them, such as newly removed plants present before the root draws nutriment from the earth. Even stones of some magnitude are at times drawn over their holes. The horticulturist perhaps encounters more mortification and disappointment than any other laborer upon the earth from insects, elementary severity, the slug, and the worm; yet, if the depredations of this last creature do at times excite a little of our irascibility, we must still remember the nightly labors, and extensive services, that are performed for the agriculturist by this scavenger of the earth, and manurer of the soil.