OFFSPRING OF SIMPLE ORGANISMS 19 



forty-eight hours the descendants of one bacterium, at 

 this rate of one division in an hour, would be two raised 

 to the forty-seventh power. 



Most of the one-celled animals and plants have this 

 method of reproducing by simple division into two, 

 though few of them multiply so rapidly as the bacteria. 



Some of them vary this method sometimes by dividing 

 the protoplasm of the original cell into several offspring 

 instead of two. In this case each of the offspring gets a 

 correspondingly smaller share of the original body. 



5. What of the Parent? This method of reproduction 

 raises an interesting question. The original organism 

 divides into two equal offspring. There is no visible 

 difference between these. There is nothing that would 

 justify us in calling one of them the parent any more 

 than the other. The substance of the parent has gone 

 into them equally. We cannot say that the parent has 

 died in the ordinary sense. There is no corpse; and yet 

 there is no parent. The parent is destroyed completely, 

 as parent, in the act of dividing. The old individual, after 

 being built up, is completely sacrificed in producing two 

 new individuals. They in their turn do the same thing. 



Note. There are some other kinds of reproduction 

 found in the one-celled plants and animals. Some of 

 these will be mentioned in other connections, as they will 

 be better understood there. Simple division is found also 

 in some of the higher organisms; but we may fairly say 

 that this simplest of all the methods of reproduction is 

 particularly representative of the simplest organisms. 



