Parasitic worlds within worlds (2)

Jan Ruyter, Three pieces of wood from the piles on the sea-dikes showing how they were eaten through by the worms, 1731. Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam

 

Quodsi porro in immensum animalculorum, quæ Teredinem inhabitant, numerum contemplationem nostram dirigamus, novum ecce detegimus illius finem, licet omnes imaginationis nostræ limites transcendentem. Ordo, locusque, concinna quam maxime ratione, singulis velut assignati animalculis Teredinem nobis marinam repræsentant, ceu mundum, illis particulariter creatum, in quo domicilium, vitæque sustentationem inveniant: neque hoc solum; sed, velut Teredine, ad parandum sibi cibum, opus habent animalcula; ita et his, ad propagationis opus, indigere rerum illa sicque, quod ajunt, manus manum lavare videtur. 

 

Godofredi Sellii, J.U.D. ex Societate Regia Londinensi, Historia Naturalis Teredinis seu Xylophagi Marini, Tubulo-Conchoidis Speciatim Belgici: cum tabulis ad vivum coloratis. 

Trajecti ad Rhenum Apud Hermannum Besseling, 1733.

If we further consider the vast number of animalcules that dwell within the ship-worm,(*) then, behold, we discover a new purpose to it, albeit one that passes beyond all the bounds of our imagination. So elegantly conceived, the order and place that are as if assigned to the animalcules show us that the ship-worm is like a world created specifically for them, in which they find a home and life's sustenance. But this is not all: as the animalcules need the ship-worm in order to furnish themselves with food, so too the ship-worm needs the animalcules in order to propagate and thus, as they say, one hand washes the other.

(*) Teredo navalis (Linnaeus, 1758), a marine bivalve mollusc that bores into the wooden hulls of ships, underwater piles, submerged timber, and which lives in symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria—the animalcules described by Sellius—whose enzymes help the ship-worm to digest the cellulose on which it feeds. 

    In the winter of 1731, the dikes along the Dutch North Sea coast collapsed, flooding villages inland, and it was subsequently discovered that they had been undermined by a ship-worm infestation that left their wooden piles riddled with holes. The worm-engendered calamity was seen by the fanatical ministers of the Reformed Church as divine punishment for the depravity then supposed to be flooding the Dutch Republic: 'The worm had been, it was said by the authors of The Worm a Warning to the Feckless and Sinful Netherlands and The Finger of God, Or Holland and Zeeland in Great Need from this Hitherto Unheard Plague of Worms, custom-made by the Almighty for the express purpose of punishing a stiff-necked people steeped in filth and sin' (Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Vintage Books, 1997, p. 607).