Worm-men

The Worm-men are a species of the Blazing-World whose distinctive access to the earth’s interior makes them natural philosophers and, later, indispensable agents of the Empress’s military power. Their learned investigations range from frost, springs, minerals, and animal life to the limits of observation itself. The same ability to move beneath the ground that informs their account of nature also lets them place fire-stones under the foundations of towns resisting the Empress’s campaign, making their scientific knowledge an instrument of imperial rule.

Identity and Role

The Worm-men belong to the Blazing-World’s many kinds of people, whose forms and professions vary by species. The Empress encourages each group to pursue work suited to its nature and establishes schools and societies for the study of useful arts and sciences. She assigns the Worm-men to natural philosophy, alongside the Fish-men and Fly-men. Their investigations extend below the earth’s surface, where they claim to observe minerals and minute animals and to perceive conditions inaccessible to ordinary surface observers.

Their role combines specialized inquiry with service to the state. They report their observations to the Empress, confer with other learned groups, and receive her encouragement to continue their studies. Later, the Empress and the Duchess of Newcastle rely on their ability to travel within the earth and their familiarity with fire-stone. The Worm-men therefore connect two spheres that the narrative repeatedly places in contact: the investigation of nature and the exercise of sovereign power.

Investigations of Nature

In conference with the Empress, the Worm-men join the Fish-men in explaining the sea’s salinity and tides. Their account attributes both to volatile salt in the earth around the sea: the salt becomes fixed as the sea imbibes it, while portions that are less readily absorbed rise and lift the water. They present this as an alternative to explanations based on the earth’s movement or the Moon’s influence. Their answer is a proposed account, not a demonstration that settles the question; the episode stages natural philosophy as a contest among explanations offered by different observers.

The Worm-men also discuss living creatures in the sea and other waters. Some animals have blood, they say, while others do not; in Lobsters they identify a small vein running through the middle of the tail, and in Crea-fishes one in the back. The Empress’s questions lead from these reports to uncertainty about animal perception. The Worm-men observe that creatures may have different senses and organs that human senses cannot discover. In an Oyster, they locate a common sensorium near the shell’s closure, where pressure and reaction can be observed as the shells open and shut with the tides. Their observations suggest that the limits of inquiry may lie not only in a lack of instruments but in differences between the perceiver and the creature being studied.

On frost, the Worm-men offer an account resembling the Fish-men’s and Bird-men’s explanation of water freezing into ice and snow: saline and acid particles combine. The proposal helps the Ape-men, the Blazing-World’s chymists, think about their principles of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. But when the Empress asks what becomes of the saline particles as frost, snow, and ice return to their former state, none of the groups can answer. The episode preserves the value of a theory while marking a question it leaves unresolved.

Their reports on springs combine competing explanations. Some attribute the ebb and flow of certain springs to seawater moving through hollow caverns in the earth and pushing spring-water back and forth; others invoke small amounts of saline and acid particles absorbed from the earth. To explain why springs are fresh, they describe heat within the earth—arising, they say, from its swift circular motion on its axis—as distilling the earth’s rarer parts into fresh, insipid water. The water travels through pores and emerges where it meets no obstruction, nourishing the earth’s drier and grosser parts. This account confirms the Empress in her view of the earth’s motion and the Sun’s fixedness, as previously reported by the Bird-men. On the generation of minerals and plants, however, the Worm-men do not give her a decisive cause: they argue that heat and cold are effects rather than primary producers, since changes in corporeal motions can turn what is hot into cold and what is cold into hot. They also report that the earth’s center is hottest, while gold and silver are not most abundant in the Torrid Zone and iron and lead occur especially in colder regions toward the Poles.

The Empress tests the reach of their knowledge against the possibilities of art. Asked whether art can produce iron, tin, lead, or silver, the Worm-men answer that they do not think it can, though they had suggested that certain metals might be suitable for the artificial transmutation of gold. The Empress points out the inconsistency: if gold is the more fixed and powerful metal, it is difficult to understand why it could be made by art when weaker metals could not. The Worm-men plead ignorance of that art and direct the question to the Ape-men. Their exchange makes the organization of knowledge visible: a natural philosopher may report observations without claiming authority over chymical practice.

The Worm-men distinguish what the senses can inspect after a natural creature has been produced from what they cannot perceive beforehand. They say that rational perception can judge the interior figurative motions of natural things and their productions when those motions are regular. When the Empress asks for the Bear-men’s Microscopes to help them examine what lies inside the earth, the Bear-men caution that their glasses depend on light and on the reflections and positions of light upon exterior objects. The Worm-men reply that underground creatures are not blind: they can see minerals and minute animals through forms of perception suited to their own conditions. Glasses designed for surface-dwelling creatures, they argue, would not necessarily serve those with different optical senses. The exchange limits the authority of instruments by tying their usefulness to the perceiver’s particular mode of access.

The Worm-men also describe natural production as interaction among parts rather than creation from nothing. Seeds, they explain, multiply by joining and commixing with other parts, which assist in forming further particulars; their motions may escape animal perception without being concealed in nature itself. They deny that nature has an absolute beginning: nature is eternal and infinite, and its particulars undergo continual changes and transmutations through their own corporeal, figurative motions. In their account of underground life, parts of the earth join in composing particular things, but factions among them may produce mixed species such as weeds instead of flowers or useful fruits. Gardeners and husbandmen can bring the contending parts into agreement, yet this human ordering can injure worms and other underground animals, dissolving their habitats or driving them out. Worms, they add, are produced according to their species from flowers, roots, fruits, or ordinary earth; the parts that assist their production do not give them their life, which belongs to the creatures themselves.

Limits, Disagreement, and the Empress’s Use of Knowledge

The Empress is pleased by many of the Worm-men’s answers and encourages their studies, but their conferences do not turn them into unquestioned authorities. Some questions remain unanswered; others shift to a different discipline, as when the Worm-men refer metalworking problems to the Ape-men. Their account of subterranean perception also challenges the assumption that a single instrument or sensory standard can make all nature legible. Knowledge in these exchanges is productive but partial, dependent on the observer’s capacities and on the fit between a question and a method.

The Empress later draws on an earlier report from the Bird-men about a burning mountain. She sends the wisest and most subtle Worm-men to discover the cause of its eruption. After descending to the mountain’s base, they report a stone that becomes intensely hot and bursts into flame when wetted, then stops burning as it dries. At the Empress’s request, they bring her some of the stone in secret. This investigation establishes the practical knowledge that will later make the Worm-men’s subterranean access militarily consequential: they can locate the stone and understand the condition that activates it.

Campaign and Consequences

When the Duchess of Newcastle advises the Empress on how to defeat the fleets threatening her native country, she proposes using fire-stone against wooden ships. The Empress sends the Worm-men to the Blazing-World’s burning mountains to obtain a large supply. In the subsequent campaign, the Empress’s forces defeat the invading fleets and establish the King of Esfi’s authority, but some nations later refuse tributary submission. Those without dependence on foreign sea trade resist the demands made upon them, and the Empress threatens to burn their towns and cities if they do not yield.

The Worm-men make that threat operational. The Empress orders them to travel with the Bird-men to the resistant nations, while the Bear-men use Telescopes to identify the towns that will not submit. The Worm-men ask only to be set down on any part of the nations’ territory; once there, they can travel within the earth as readily as people travel over its surface. At the selected towns, they put fire-stones beneath house foundations, while the Bird-men place more on rooftops. The Bird-men warn inhabitants that rain will set their towns on fire. The warning is met with disbelief because the people know water as something that quenches fire, not something that produces it.

Rain activates the stones, and the houses catch fire. The spectacle frightens neighboring cities and kingdoms into accepting the Empress’s demand that they submit to the King of Esfi. One country, which receives little rain, initially dismisses the threat. The Empress’s forces adapt the method to its seasonal flooding: the Worm-men place fire-stones beneath the supports on which its elevated houses stand. When the annual tide arrives, the houses burn; the heat turns the water to vapor, and the resulting destruction is accompanied by barrenness across the country that year. That nation, too, submits.

The Worm-men’s trajectory thus moves from observation to application. Their knowledge is not presented as a complete mastery of nature: their answers leave problems unresolved, and the Empress’s conferences expose the limits of instruments and senses. Yet one carefully investigated material property—the fire-stone’s response to moisture—becomes decisive in a campaign of coercion. The Worm-men’s ability to move underground gives the Empress a way to reach the foundations of resistance, turning the hidden depths they study into a route by which sovereign power penetrates and subdues the surface world.