Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger organisms to the working of the great terraqueous machine.
— GEORGE PERKINS MARCH, MAN AND NATURE (1864)
THE TROUBLE WITH WORMS is that they seem to have been extruded. Both the way they look and the way they move are not calculated to endear them to animals that go upon legs. Indeed, so much do they appear to have been squeezed out of somewhere, that in the Middle Ages, it was felt that they were spontaneously generated in the earth.
Perhaps this is because there are so many of them. It has been two centuries since Linnaeus gave up trying to create a whole phylum for the worms, to be called Vermes, because there were too many and they were too various. One suspects that it was also too distasteful. After all, the word “vermin,” though most often applied to rats, comes from the Latin for “worm.”
What makes a worm? It is slinky, slithery, slimy, soft, blind, and voracious. Most, it would seem, are parasites. There are the pinworms that live in the guts of animals, devouring feces and attaching themselves to the walls of the gut. There are the roundworms that pierce plant roots with their spearlike mouth parts, suck the roots’ juice, and infect them, producing stunted plants or misshapen roots. There are tapeworms that grow to a length of more than a hundred feet inside the host; flukes that infect the blood; and leeches that suck it. There are roundworms that burrow beneath the skin and encyst. The slender horsehair worm is supposed to be born when a horse’s hair drops in water. And the night-feeding slug leaves its slimy trails on everything.
Then, there are all the worms-for-a-day, the larval forms of insects that are responsible for so many depredations in the soil. There are the wireworms that eat any plant tissue they find beneath the surface. The cutworms, larvae of a lovely butterfly, are deadly to all cole crops, creeping up to the soil surface and munching the roots off at the base. The chafer grubs, the carabid larvae, and all white grubs of lawns are the worm phase of beetles, adapted to infesting pasture and lawn. Fly larvae, too, like the leatherjacket, prey upon plants in the soil.
The horror at these beasts is perhaps fundamentally sourced not simply in their habits but in the fact that they colonize the dead. Disinterments are richest in the larvae of beetles and flies, yet even unburied corpses may erupt with teeming nests of worms.
The contest of man against the worm is most clearly expressed in the legends of dragons, greatest worm of all. Though they are usually reptilian and avian in their external characteristics, their fundamental characteristic is to undulate through the air and over the ground. Furthermore, they have the parasitic voracity that belongs not to reptiles but to the Vermes. (In earlier times, indeed, snakes were regarded as the kin of worms.) Most dragon fighters in Western mythology get the call because a dragon has been demanding a virgin per year, depleting the number of young women, until finally only the princess is left. The worm destroys the principle of increase and motherhood. The hero reinstates it.
Yet the worm is undeniably necessary. It hoards and guards treasures. He is a sort of banker of the fairy-tale world, though he makes it difficult to effect withdrawals. He is in this respect the representative of the dark side of metamorphosis.
The worm takes from the stock of the world’s beauty and hides it in his blind life in the earth. He stores it in a body that grows fatter and fatter. He is the embodiment of gross materiality.
In the end, however, he falls into a permanent sleep inside his self-made house. From his sleep, the grub never awakes. Instead, some process transforms the bloated white grub into a creature with colored wings or an iridescent carapace.
Which is grosser? The entombment of a grub in a cocoon, or the swelling of a child in the mother’s womb? It would be hard to say objectively. But these ultimate descents into materiality seem to be the preferred locus for miracles.