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8th december 2003
Darwin loved worms. He sang to them, played the piano. He gave them new foods to try: onions, fat, lettuce. He credited them with great intelligence (remember dissecting the earthworm? The first thing that reveals itself when you open the dorsal anterior surface, that splendidly fat white cerebral ganglion, like a walrus moustache). He wrote his last book about them - The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations of their Habits - and it was an instant bestseller, 3,500 copies in the first month. By then he was as loved a figure as Einstein was in the fifties, and Punch magazine gave him its cover in December 1881, the artist impressively anticipating Escher in his transformation of forms.
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