The Once and Future King

Chapter IV

The king said politely, stunned by such a lot of declamation: ‘Surely she would. Surely we are important from what we have done?’

‘How?’ demanded his tutor fiercely.

‘Well, I must say. Look at the buildings which we have made on the earth, and towns, and arable fields …’

‘The Great Barrier Reef,’ observed Archimedes, looking at the ceiling, ‘is a building a thousand miles long, and it was built entirely by insects.’

‘But that is only a reef …’

Merlyn dashed his hat on the floor, in his usual way.

‘Can you never learn to think impersonally?’ he demanded. ‘The coral insect would have as much right to reply to you, that London is only a town.’

‘Even then, if all the towns in the world were placed end to end …’

Archimedes said: ‘If you begin producing all the towns in the world, I shall begin producing all the coral islands and atolls. Then we will weigh them carefully against each other, and we shall see what we shall see.’

‘Perhaps coral insects are more important than men, then, but this is only one species …’

Goat said slyly: ‘The committee had a note somewhere about the beaver, I think, in which he was said to have made whole seas and continents …’

‘The birds,’ began Balin with exaggerated nonchalance, ‘by carrying the seeds of trees in their droppings, are said to have made forests so large …’

‘Them rabbits,’ interrupted the urchin, ‘whatter nigh deflopulated Austrylia …’

‘The Foraminifera of whose bodies the “white cliffs of Dover” are actually composed …’

‘The locusts …’

Merlyn held up his hand.

‘Give him the humble earth-worm,’ he said majestically.

So the animals recited in unison: ‘The naturalist Darwin has pointed out that there are about 25,000 earth-worms in every field acre, that they turn over in England alone 320,000,000 tons of soil a year, and that they are to be found in almost every region of the world. In thirty years they will alter the whole earth’s surface to the depth of seven inches. “The earth without worms,” says the immortal Gilbert White, “would soon become cold, hard-bound, void of fermentation, and consequently sterile.”’