[Illustration: FIG. 13--Pathogenic Protozoa; a group of intestinal parasites. _A_, _B_, _Megastoma entericum_, _C_, _Balantidum entozoon_. (After Calkins.)] The last class, the Sporozoa, or the spore-forming animals, while small in the number of known species, only about three hundred kinds being known, is extremely important. A number of diseases in man and other animals are due to the presence of these Sporozoans, for they are all parasitic. Few if any animals are exempt from their attacks. They even attack other minute Protozoa. One hundred and fifty-seven species have been recorded as attacking insects, one hundred species attack birds, fifty-two reptiles, eighty crustaceans, twenty-two fish, and so through the list. Ten have been recorded as attacking man. In some instances the parasite is always present in the host and some hosts may harbor several different species of Sporozoa. Very little work had been done on this group of parasites prior to 1900. Since that time most of the species that we now know have been discovered, and within the last few years the life-histories of many of these have been worked out quite completely. No other group of animals is being studied more to-day by both the physicians and biologists. The Sporozoa vary greatly in appearance, organization and life-history. They are so very plastic that they can adapt themselves readily to their various hosts, hence we have a great variety of forms. But they all agree in certain characters; all take their food and oxygen and carry on excretory processes by osmosis, _i.e._, through the body-wall; all are capable of some kind of locomotion, some have one or more flagella, others move by a pseudopod movement. Some are capable of moving from cell to cell in the body as do the white blood-corpuscles. They all agree in the production of spores--hence the name. At certain stages in their development the nucleus within the body of the organism divides again and again until there are a great many daughter nuclei, each accompanied by a small mass of protoplasm, often inclosed in a little sac or cyst of its own. This is the process of spore-formation and we see that from a single individual we may have by division, not two animals as in the amoeba, but a score or more of them. The little cysts or capsules that inclose them enable them to resist without injury many vicissitudes that would otherwise destroy them. They may dry up or freeze or lie for a long time in the ground or water until the time comes when they are introduced into another host.