Seed is the begining of life

Most naturalists believe that immeasurable ages ago life on our earth existed  only in the primary form of a sort of seed or germ. This beginning of life on our planet was what biologists call protoplasm: basic life-substance, containing potentialities of growth and development, but at first so little organized  as to contain only a hint of what  we mean now when we speak  of living creatures in their  present variety.

Over long ages, under  countries influences and  agencies which can only  partly  understand, the life-stuff developed and grew  in complexity, becoming organized  in variously shaped structures of pattern. Multiplying increasing, unfolding, it “opened up” as a plant-seed sprout, thrusts up its stem, puts forth branches and leaves, until it achieves a form that in the seed was only hidden promise.

Naturalists sometimes speak of the “tree of life”. This is one way of saying that it is all one united growth. Under all the differences of life forms there is unity, a vital relation among them, for they go back together to a common source and an hour when the seed of life began growing, long ago.

All animal life  in our world is a single  great organization: animation. This whole  living entity – now vast, multiformed, comprising thousands of interrelated species functioning with  an intricacy of parts  united  into a  whole, but once  only  protoplasm – in a sense  had a birth. It grew  through seasons  of increase, adaptation, trial-experience, the drawing out  of capacities and potential. When human eyes and mind first  looked upon  animation, man found it richly differentiated, complex, a teeming integration of inter-working parts. Once it was only  foreshadowing protoplasm, only  a seed of all this.