Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A micro-organism, whether animal or vegetal; a protozoan or protophyte; a protist.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Biol.) An organism whose nature is so difficult to determine that it might be referred to either the animal or the vegetable kingdom.
Etymologies
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Examples
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Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population such as those determining blood types to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.
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That doesn’t exclude the possibility of spectres coaxing the common ancestor’s descendants into spiritually correct directions, but it is a difficulty for most pre-1500AD models, which tend not to involve a simple protoorganism ancestor at all.
Supernatural Science 2005
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