The Seed and the Tree by Rev. Howard Crosby, D. D.

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jul 22, 1875

The Seed and the Tree.

By Rev. Howard Crosby, D. D.

It is a favorite theory with many that the egg was before the animal, and the seed before the plant; but this is not a truly scientific view of the matter. We plant an acorn, and it is true there grows up from this seed the branching oak with its mighty limbs and rich foliage. But whence came those limbs and that foliage? From the seed? Certainly not. The oak was never in the acorn. There was a vital principle in the acorn, by whose action under certain requisite conditions the materials from surrounding nature were drawn to it, united and assimilated so as to make the oak. The oak, we know, was never in the acorn. Could that great bulk have been in the little seed? When that acorn was planted, the future oak was lying all around in the other vegetable matter of the earth. Now then, if the analogy of growth, as we see it, requires not only the seed, but a surrounding field of material for that seed to use, how could an original seed have effected anything when there was no surrounding vegetation? The oak must have been before the seed, the animal before the egg. If we are going back to originals, it is in this way we must solve the problem. And now what does the first chapter of Genesis say? “And the earth brought forth the herb yielding seed [not the seed yielding herb], and the tree whose seed is in itself [not the seed whose tree is in itself].” What mere human mind would ever have thought of putting it in this way? And yet this is the only way in which a true science can settle the question between the seed and the tree.—Rev. Howard Crosby, D. D.