Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, February 4, 1868

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 8

THE TREE OF LIFE.

It has been a puzzling query with many how the tree of life, but one tree, could be at the same time on both sides of the river of life, as John, in Rev. xxii, 2, says that he saw it. The Banyan tree, of India, with its multitude of trunks all united in the top, furnishes one good illustration of how this could be. But this is not the only tree of this kind, as we learn from the “North American Sylva,” p. 152. Speaking of the cherry fig tree of the West India Islands, it says:

“This species of fig tree was discovered by Jacquin, in the island of Martinique; it is also indigenous to some other of the West India Islands, as well as to the neighboring continent of Tropical America. At Key West, according to Dr. Blodgett, it becomes a large, spreading tree, fifty feet in hight, and like some other species, particularly the famous Banyan tree (F. Indica), it sends down roots from its lofty branches, resembling ropes, which, on reaching the soil, at length become so many independent trunks, in turn producing others; and spreading themselves on all sides without interruption, they present a united summit of prodigious extent, which, reposing on a multitude of trunks of different dimensions, seems like the airy vault of some vast edifice sustained by innumerable columns.”