Word: wormed
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Constantly and voraciously, earthworms eat earth, dead leaves, decaying organic matter of all sorts. The waste material they throw off as worm casts is one of the richest of all plant foods. Moreover, worm tunnels-air the soil, helping the oxygen and nitrogen metabolism of plants. And the tunnels make fine watering tubes, facilitate rainfall storage. Darwin estimated that a healthy English acre ought to have about 2,500,000 worms, turning out 18 tons of casts a year...
Oliver branched out to public parks and cemeteries, eventually to $10,000-and-up jobs for cinema stars in Hollywood, whither his fame had traveled. The worm wizard moved to California, set up a ten-acre experimental farm in Los Angeles County. It was guarded by tall board fences topped with barbed wire. When Depression set in after 1929, Oliver at last told his secret, for the benefit of hard-pressed farmers. By that time he had rolled up a tidy fortune...
...still a big worm operator. Earthworms are hermaphrodites; all healthy adults lay eggs by the score, and Oliver gathers them by the million, from layers of damp burlap in his culture beds. Packed in damp peat moss, they can be shipped any distance. Thirty days after being unpacked and put in the soil, the eggs hatch; 90 days later they become adults laying eggs of their own. Earthworms make a wonderfully nourishing and relatively cheap food for poultry, hatchery fish, market frogs, terrapin. Everybody knows that chickens like worms. Dr. Oliver has devised what he calls an "intensive range" poultry...
...Caesarean-wise by a repentant dragon who had swallowed her. A fox ogled out-of-reach grapes in the earliest extant copy of Aesop (circa 1000 A.D.). A 15th-Century German volume showed a woodcut of bewildered apes trying to light a fire with the aid of a glow worm (see cut), while birds jeered from a tree...
...yanked and kneaded into some semblance of muscular control, had learned all over again how to wash his face, tie his tie, handle a knife & fork, he headed for his ranch in the Amazon jungle. He was in charge of an expedition, financed by Philanthropist Sayre Merrill, 1) to worm from the Indians the black magic of curare cooking, 2) to bring back to the U. S. enough curare for laboratory use, 3) to bring back any other useful drugs from the Indian pharmacopoeia. Rancher Gill succeeded in all three tasks. The best parts of his somewhat flamboyantly written book...