To get earthworms for fishing, people do a thing called ‘worm grunting’
An article on earthworms published in the New York Times in 1881 – “Habits of earth-worms: The curious work which they accomplish” – describes a helminth British empire. “In England they abound in the fields, in the paved courts of houses, though they are rarer in bog fields,” the author writes. “Worm castings have been found as high as 1,500 feet in the Scotch hills and at great altitudes in south India, and on the Himalaya mountains. Both in the extremes of a climate like England and in very hot weather, worms cease their work.”
Earthworms are hermaphrodites, which the journalist, all the way back in 1881, expresses in a glittering sentence: “Two sexes unite in one individual but two individuals pair”.
