Worm-men Natural Philosophers

The Worm-men Natural Philosophers are a learned society whose inquiries into the hidden processes of the earth make them important interpreters of the Blazing-World’s natural philosophy. The Empress turns to them for accounts of frost, springs, minerals, seeds, and underground life; their answers sometimes clarify natural phenomena, sometimes expose the limits of observation, and sometimes leave her without a settled explanation. Their knowledge also acquires a direct political use when the Empress sends them to obtain Fire-stone for her expedition.

Identity and Field of Inquiry

Among the many kinds of inhabitants in the Blazing-World, the Worm-men are assigned the profession of natural philosophers. The Empress establishes learned societies and encourages each people to pursue studies considered appropriate to its kind; the Worm-men’s particular field is the natural world, especially its processes beneath the earth’s surface. Their work belongs to a broader culture of specialized investigation, but their subterranean subject matter repeatedly raises a question that applies to the whole society: what can one kind of observer know about the motions and productions of nature?

Their inquiries range from familiar environmental changes to fundamental questions about generation. Asked how frost forms, they describe it through the commixture of saline and acid particles, in a manner resembling the accounts the Fish-men and Bird-men have given for ice and snow. Their report gives the Ape-men, who are the Chymists, material for considering salt, sulphur, and mercury as chemical principles. Yet the Empress immediately presses on a difficulty within the explanation: if such particles produce immense quantities of frost, ice, and snow, what becomes of them when these substances melt? Neither the Worm-men nor the other societies can answer. The exchange shows their contribution as provisional inquiry rather than final authority: an account can prompt further thinking while leaving its own consequences unexplained.

Explanations and the Limits of Observation

The Worm-men offer more than one account of springs. Some attribute the ebb and flow of certain springs to hollow caverns through which seawater advances and retreats, carrying the spring water with it. Others suggest that saline and acid particles absorbed from the earth cause the motion, even when their quantity is too slight to be detected by taste. To explain why spring water is fresh, they propose that heat arising from the earth’s rapid rotation distils its rarest parts into fresh, insipid water; passing through the earth’s pores, this water emerges where it can break through and nourishes the earth’s coarser, drier parts.

This explanation confirms the Empress in her view that the earth moves while the sun remains fixed, a conclusion she had also heard from the Bird-men. But the Worm-men do not claim that heat and cold are the primary causes of minerals, plants, or other creatures. They regard them instead as effects: changes in corporeal motion can make what was hot become cold and what was cold become hot. They point out that the earth’s centre is hottest, yet the Torrid Zone does not contain as much gold and silver as temperate regions, and iron and lead are more often found in colder climates toward the poles. The Empress uses these observations to instruct the Ape-men that gold is not produced by an extreme, violent degree of heat. When she asks whether art can make gold, the Worm-men cannot say for certain; they propose tin, lead, brass, iron, and silver as more suitable materials for artificial transmutation. Asked whether art can produce those metals, however, they answer that they do not think so. The Empress exposes the inconsistency: their confidence that gold might be made by art does not fit their denial that weaker metals can be produced that way. The Worm-men concede that the question belongs more properly to the Ape-men’s expertise.

A dispute over what their senses can reveal further defines the society’s limits. The Worm-men say they perceive the interior figurative motions of plants and minerals only after those bodies have been produced, not beforehand. They nevertheless maintain that reason can judge the motions and productions when they are regular. The Empress asks the Bear-men to lend them Microscopes, but the Bear-men answer that their instruments depend on reflected light and will be of little use within the earth. The Worm-men reply that they are not blind below ground: they can see minerals and minute animals, whose own modes of perception serve them as sight, taste, smell, touch, or hearing serve other creatures. Nature, in this account, provides for underground inhabitants as well as those living on the earth’s surface, in air, or in water. Yet the Worm-men add that Microscopes designed for creatures with surface-dwelling kinds of optical perception may still be unsuitable for underground beings. Instruments do not yield knowledge independently of the perceiver and the conditions under which perception occurs.

The Worm-men also challenge the Empress’s assumption that a body might be colourless, laughing at the question before asking her pardon for their rudeness. On a further inquiry, they distinguish between seeds of minerals, which their perceptions have never detected, and seeds of plants, which they say produce vegetation. These seeds are not annihilated in reproduction; rather, their parts multiply through conjunction and mixture with other parts. Their productive motions remain concealed from animal perception, though the seeds do not conceal themselves in the process of multiplying. The conversation turns from observation toward the nature of change itself. Asked whether there is a beginning of forms, they answer that nature is eternal and infinite, and that its particulars undergo endless transformations through their own corporeal, figurative motions. In their view, there is no first beginning of things in nature as the Empress’s question supposes.

Natural Motion and Interdependence

For the Worm-men, production is not creation from nothing by an isolated cause. The parts of the earth join and assist one another in composing particular forms. Their account also gives conflict a place in natural generation: factions and divisions among those parts can produce mixed species, such as weeds in place of sweet flowers and useful fruits. Gardeners and husbandmen intervene to settle these disputes, but that intervention has consequences for other inhabitants. It can harm Worms and other underground animals, dissolve them, or drive them from their habitations. Cultivation thus appears not simply as improvement but as a human ordering of nature that may damage beings whose lives unfold beneath the soil.

The Worm-men resist the Empress’s description of worms as children feeding on their parents. Worms may arise from flowers, roots, fruits, or ordinary earth, but their life is their own, not a gift transferred by their parents. No part or creature of nature, they argue, can give or take life; parts only assist and combine with other parts in the production or dissolution of creatures. The claim reinforces their wider picture of a world made through ongoing relations among moving parts, rather than through a fixed hierarchy of origins and offspring.

Their account of seeds likewise stresses multiplication through interaction rather than self-sufficient growth. A seed does not increase merely by itself; other parts assist it, and by imitation form or figure parts into particular offspring. That explanation leaves the Empress probing how seeds act and become imperceptible, but the Worm-men insist that their concealment concerns animal perception, not a disappearance of the productive motions themselves. Nature’s transformations exceed what the senses can follow, even when rational inquiry can propose an account of them.

Service to the Empress

The Worm-men’s role extends from investigation to service in the Empress’s religious and political projects. When she fears that her subjects may grow tired of her instruction and desert the faith she has sought to establish, she recalls the Bird-men’s report of a flaming mountain. She sends the wisest and most subtle Worm-men to discover the cause of its eruption. They descend to the mountain’s bottom and report that it contains a stone which becomes intensely hot and bursts into flame when wetted, continuing to burn until it dries. The Empress asks them to bring her some of this Fire-stone, but to keep the matter secret.

The stone becomes part of the Empress’s design for two moving chapels: she has one chapel lined with diamonds and uses the Fire-stone there, while the second is lined with Star-stone. Water carried through artificial pipes causes the Fire-stone to blaze, allowing the chapel to appear filled with fire. The Worm-men’s discovery thus supplies a material means for the Empress’s religious staging, connecting their practical knowledge of a natural process to her exercise of sovereignty and persuasion.

Later, the Duchess advises the Empress to use Fire-stone against the wooden ships of an invading world. The Empress sends Worm-men to the Burning-Mountains to gather a large quantity, while also assigning Fish-men, Bird-men, and Bear-men to support the expedition in different ways. The stone’s properties now have a military use: wet, it burns long enough to set wooden vessels alight and can also serve as a source of light in a world with dark nights. The Worm-men do not lead the expedition in the evidence presented, but their ability to locate and procure the substance makes the plan possible.

Knowledge, Authority, and Political Order

The society’s importance lies partly in the contrast between the Empress’s demand for reliable answers and the uncertain, sometimes contradictory state of inquiry. The Worm-men can offer detailed explanations of springs, earth heat, seeds, and subterranean perception, yet they cannot settle every question the Empress raises. They distinguish observation from inference, acknowledge when their senses have not detected something, and defer questions about artificial metal production to the Ape-men. Their expertise matters, but it is neither universal nor immune to challenge.

The Empress’s treatment of learned societies also shows that inquiry is political. When she establishes the societies, she expects knowledge to serve the public good. In another controversy, the Bear-men ask permission to keep their Telescopes despite the divisions they cause, and the Empress allows them to remain only on condition that disputes stay within their schools and do not disturb the state. Later, when conflict among the learned societies threatens government, the Duchess recommends dissolving them and restoring one law, one religion, and one language. These episodes frame the Worm-men’s work within a polity that values useful knowledge while fearing the factions that open-ended debate may produce. The Worm-men’s investigations serve the Empress’s rule, but the narrative’s repeated gaps and disagreements also expose the difficulty of turning partial natural knowledge into certainty or stable authority.