ABSTRACT
Poe writes “While I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious Volume of forgotten lore;…,” thus reporting upon a more or less solitary activity in scholasticism. Our effort is not science in the sense of learning new facts about an objective reality, but an exercise in automated pondering. If the emphasis is upon pondering over volumes, the task is both vastly simpler and impossibly more complex than in Poe’s century. Automated indexing and teleprocessed bibliography make bibliographies easy to make in order to fulfill the evidential form for scholarship. Reading them and collating the attendant ideas and discoveries into a coherent thesis, however, is virtually impossible, and makes us amateur scholars. A contemporary automated bibliography for the ideas in this volume will easily exceed the volume, and would likely be unusable. In all our interests, we encounter the physical impossibility of finding, citing, and crediting all references that deal with the multiple fields of study that converge to make a consideration of C. elegans’ “wormness” an exciting adventure. In reporting only those sources over which we pored, we do injustice, no doubt, to many whose work is germane, essential, or even contrary to the grist of premises we use. To them we sincerely apologize, but without a sense of guilt.
