01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 14, 2004

BY TONY LEWIS
Special to The Journal

THE EARTH MOVED, by Amy Stewart. Algonquin Books. 215 pages. $23.95.

Let's face it: worms haven't had a very good press. Now, however, readers of Amy Stewart's fascinating little book, The Earth Moved, may view their backyard neighbors with interest, and perhaps even affection.

Stewart is no scientist, "just an ordinary gardener who is curious about earthworms," she says, who became addicted to the little critters when she set up two worm composting bins on her porch as a way of harvesting their "castings" -- worm manure -- to use in her garden. These days, her 10,000 worms provide a steady stream of nutrients that she works into the soil.

Her book begins, appropriately enough, with a handy summary of Darwin's views and with a quick look at the various worms that make up the class Oligochaeta. Combining the intellectual curiosity of a scholar with the insights of a hands-in-the-dirt gardener, Stewart gives all the relevant facts and supplements them with interviews with specialists. Her ease in gliding from worms to plants to humans will remind readers of John McPhee's essays on canoes, oranges, the geology of America.

Along the way, we learn a great deal about worms, almost all of it surprising. More varied and bizarre than we might have guessed, worms exist in astonishing numbers -- up to a million per acre. And they're not all as familiar as nightcrawlers or their smaller relatives that turn up in a spadeful of earth. There's the giant earthworm that lives in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington state, for example. These two-footers are difficult to find because they "sound" when you come looking for them, quickly burrowing as deep as 15 feet.

While Stewart finds worms "companionable creatures -- clean, quiet and hardworking," she also recognizes them as "one of the largest beings in its world," where each worm is "an elephant, a whale -- a giant."

Hers is a new slant on a familiar creature. Even highschoolers know that worms are hermaphrodites, each having both sets of sexual organs. But did you know that worms can grow new body parts and "spontaneously heal from injury?" Or that earthworms breathe through their skin? And have up to five pairs of hearts?

For all their oddness (some worms live as long as 30 years), it's the earthworm's well-known ability to aerate and enrich soil that makes it one of humankind's best friends. In a chapter entitled "From Garbage to Gold," she rhapsodizes about the way "they consume, they transform, they change the earth," and argues for the worms as ecological benefactors.

"I have come to understand, like Darwin had," she writes, "that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers."

Tony Lewis, a former English professor, has worms for neighbors at his country house in Dartmouth.