Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/477/en

is reduced to the sense of touch, to point-senses distributed across the body. The activity of this delicate, slimy-watery animal is the working of the soil. It is a sculptor of the solid-earthy. It lives in the darkness of the earth, pressing itself in search of food through the loose living topsoil after the remains of dead plant matter, and eats its way into the depths of the dense mineral subsoil, forming its vertical tubes, which serve it as a kind of outer skeleton and lend it the vertical upright in its movements up and downward. Its mineral-permeated excrement it carries against gravity upward to the surface of the earth (up to 100 t/ha/year), and so rejuvenates the soil year by year. It actively promotes soil breathing, drawing oxygen-rich outside air behind it as it glides downward through its tubes — like a pump — and as it glides upward again, thrusting out CO₂-enriched soil air. Its food is dead, bacterially decomposing organic substance, which it takes into its interior together with clay, silt, and fine sand. Outwardly it secretes slime; inwardly its soul organization «thinks through» the ingested stream of nourishment and guides a host of bacterial symbionts that break the food down, and — in connection with the mineral clay constituents of the food — initiates the formation of stable humus, the formation of the crumb-stable clay-humus complexes.