The animal does all of these things with a
purely individual benefit, namely, the prolongation of its own life. While
it is performing these individual tasks, it does not concern itself with
anything else but its own welfare; the interests of other living things
are not involved in any way, excepting in the case of other organisms that
may serve the animal as food. _Amoeba_, like every other living thing,
if it is to exist, must unconsciously obey the first great commandment of
nature,--"_Preserve thyself_."
But its life is incomplete if it stops with the furtherance of aims that
we may call purely selfish. Nature also demands that an _Amoeba_, again
like every other living thing, shall perpetuate its kind. The mode by
which it reproduces is ordinarily quite simple; the animal grows to a
certain bulk and then it divides into two masses of protoplasm, each of
which receives a portion of the mother nucleus. Sometimes by a peculiar
process it breaks up into numerous small fragments called spores, which
also receive portions of the parent nucleus. The most striking feature in
both kinds of reproduction in _Amoeba_ is the complete destruction of
the individual parent that exists before the act and does not afterwards.
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