354 The Morality of Nature 



This finally reduced cell, which is a mere spore, acquires 

 in this reduced condition a reduced susceptibility to injury. 

 Such spores endure cold and heat and other abnormal cir- 

 cumstances which would destroy the active cell. But in ad- 

 dition it acquires by its minuteness transportability, which 

 sometimes we see developed by actual motile organs. In 

 this capacity it more readily finds new environment, which 

 may perchance be better than the old, for its special faculties 

 and failings, and it may find there others of similar consti- 

 tution, with whom it may conjugate in the former duplex 

 organization, and so may resume activity in a new cycle. 

 But beyond all these advantages there appears one which is 

 destined by its superiority to become most important. This 

 is the advantage to such a spore-like cell, of finding one of 

 its own kind which is still endowed with an excess of the 

 cytoplasm in which this cell is deficient; one which has ex- 

 perienced an abnormal surfeit of prosperity and is therefore 

 complementary to this one sufifering the results of a surfeit 

 of activity. There are such cells and the encounter does 

 happen. In some cells a similar divisioa occurs, with a vari- 

 ation, under circumstances which may seem to be quite dif- 

 ferent, and yet must have relationship. The cells which 

 exist under abnormally favorable circumstances and are 

 favored in highest nutrition, with no destructive adversity 

 of external conditions, also reach at last a maturity some- 

 what similar except in one regard. The cell at the end of 

 many divisions, like those recited above, in which the last 

 of its former chromosomes remains in one quarter number, 

 is of abnormally large cytoplasmic size. This condition 

 seems to arise in a loss of the normal relationship between 



