The toad, like his water cousin, the frog, has a long tongue, fastened to the front of his jaw. It unrolls, darts out like lightning, catches an insect on a gummy tip, and snaps back quicker than a wink. A toad can clear a house of cockroaches, and a few in a garden will give you more sound vegetables and fewer worms. Tree toads are useful in forests and orchards, and frogs in ponds and swamps. The garden spider is useful, too. (See Mrs. Garden Spider "At Home.")
There is another very humble, helpless little friend that you should not harm. This is the smooth, pinkish-brown worm that you dig for fish bait. It is a true worm, and not a caterpillar or larva of an insect. Its real name is earth-worm. It eats earth for the water and decaying vegetables, but every bit that it eats passes through its soft body, and is powdered and enriched so it will grow plants better.
After a hard rain you may see sidewalks strewn with their dead bodies. They cannot live without moisture, but too much rain often drowns them out of their burrows. If a living worm is touched it shrinks to half its six or eight inches of length, which shows that the little blind creature can feel, and be afraid. Then you can see that its body is made up of ring muscles. And under a magnifying glass you can find tiny hook-like feet, and a sharp gimlet of a boring nose. That nose bores through and through the soil. One worm, it is said, can turn up a quart of finely powdered earth in a summer. And it must turn up many insect eggs and cocoons, to be eaten or to die. Earth worms is one sign of good soil. When the soil is naturally poor, or is worn out by bad farming, there will be few earthworms in it or none at all. (See Dragon-fly, Ichneumon Fly, Frog, Toad, Lady-bird, Earthworm.)
