Sir,

I have been very much interested and informed by your Book on Vegetable Mould, and venture to express my thanks to you for the pleasure and information I have derived from its perusal.¹

As related to the subject, and as tending to illustrate the muscular powers of the worm and its capacity for self defence, you may perhaps be disposed to glance over a short note of a combat which took place in my garden some two years since between a worm and a frog.² The former was about six or seven inches long and the latter of ordinary dimensions, and when I first discovered them half the worm had disappeared down the frog’s throat. I watched them for a quarter of an hour and during that time the tussle was pretty severe. The worm on several occasions threw the frog on its back, and, though apparently unable to disengage itself, the annelid seemed to have rather the best of the fight. I was absent from the battle field some ten minutes but returned in time to witness the termination of the struggle, when they were breaking asunder. The engagement seemed to have been drawn, and each, clearly, had had quite enough of it. Both bore evidence of the severity of the encounter, and both appeared exhausted and considerably the worse for what they had gone through. The frog limped away in a very “groggy” condition, whilst the worm crawled off in an opposite direction, to all appearance in a wretched plight and very much knocked up. I should add that the struggle extended from a flower bed on to a gravel path and back again, over a space which I roughly estimated as of some five or six feet square.

I am, Sir, | yours faithfully, | Geo: F. Crawte

C. Darwin Esq^re,