What kind of creature is a protozoan?
Ordinary folk call him a one celled animal or a single celled animal. Biologists refer to the miraculous midget as a protozoan. Scientists need meaningful scientific terms to name their subjects s o that their colleagues who speak other languages know what they mean. There was a time when biologists spelled this word “protozoon.” The “zoo” syllable is borrowed from an older world meaning “life” or “living.” We meet it in such words as “zoo,” a place for the display of living animals, and in “zoology” the branch of biology that copes with the study of living animals. The “proto” syllable of our scien¬tific term is coined from an older word meaning “first” or “original.” The first or original life forms tended to be simpler than the more complex forms that developed from them and appeared later. In the sciences, the “proto” syllable may be stretched to mean the simplest form of something. Protozoon is a rather clumsy word, and since scientists strive to grasp things at their simplest lev
