Catharina in South Brazil, and
Fritz Muller informs me "that in most parts of the forests and
pasture-lands, the whole soil, to a depth of a quarter of a metre,
looks as if it had passed repeatedly through the intestines of
earth-worms, even where hardly any castings are to be seen on the
surface." A gigantic but very rare species is found there, the
burrows of which are sometimes even two centimeters or nearly 0.8
of an inch in diameter, and which apparently penetrate the ground
to a great depth.
In the dry climate of New South Wales, I hardly expected that worms
would be common; but Dr. G. Krefft of Sydney, to whom I applied,
after making inquiries from gardeners and others, and from his own
observations, informs me that their castings abound. He sent me
some collected after heavy rain, and they consisted of little
pellets, about 0.15 inch in diameter; and the blackened sandy earth
of which they were formed still cohered with considerable tenacity.
The late Mr. John Scott of the Botanic Gardens near Calcutta made
many observations for me on worms living under the hot and humid
climate of Bengal. The castings abound almost everywhere, in
jungles and in the open ground, to a greater degree, as he thinks,
than in England. After the water has subsided from the flooded
rice-fields, the whole surface very soon becomes studded with
castings--a fact which much surprised Mr.
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