Une certaine espèce de petits vers

In 1666, Le Journal des Sçavans published a letter from Amsterdam that described ships returning from the East Indies whose hulls were infested with a destructive 'worm', no doubt the Teredo navalis which was to inflict such devastation on the North Sea dykes sixty-five years later:

 

Quoy que vous ayez souvent visité nostre port, je ne sçay si vous avez remarqué le mauvais estat où se trouvent les vaisseaux qui reviennent des Indes. Il y a dans ces mers une certaine espece de petits vers, qui s'attachent aux œuvres vives des vaisseaux, & les percent de sorte qu'ils prennent eau de tous costez, ou s'ils ne les traversent pas entierement, ils affoiblissent tellement le bois, qu'il est presque impossible de les racommoder.

 

Extrait d'une Lettre escrite d'Amsterdam, Le Journal des Sçavans. Du Lundy 15. Fevrier, M.DC.LXVI

 

This Extract is borrowed from the French journal des Scavans of Febr. 15. 1666. and is here inserted, to excite Inventive heads here, to overtake the Proposer in Holland. The letter runs thus:
    Although you have visited our Port (Amsterdam) I know not whether you have noted the ill condition, our ships are in, that return from the Indies. There is in those Seas a kind of small worms, that fasten themselves to the Timber of the ships, and so pierce them, that they take water every where; or if they do not altogether pierce them thorow, they so weaken the wood, that it is almost impossible to repair them.

An Extract Of a Letter, Written from Holland, about Preserving of Ships from being Worm-eaten, Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 1 (1665-1666)

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).