Σπέρμα (as contained in the Septuagint) has almost an identical signification with the Hebrew word ZRA. It means the "germ of anything," or the "germinal principle of life," as contained in anything that lives or grows. No one will claim that it is used in its literal sense of "seed," in the text. For, when the divine command was issued, there was no plant or tree, and, presumably, had been none upon the earth from which seed could have been derived. The word was used in its larger and more comprehensive (that is, metaphorical) sense, as the "germinal principle of life in matter," or precisely in the sense in which the Greek stoics used it in their philosophy. Both Theophrastus and Diogenes use the terms σπερματ´κοὶ γόγοι expressing "the laws of generation contained in matter"--precisely the meaning we attach to it in its textual connection. The eleventh verse should read, therefore, as follows: "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose germinal principle of life, each in itself after its kind, is upon the earth"
We accept this rendering of "the seventy," because they had the most complete and perfect Hebrew MSS. before them, and were no doubt better scholars, and far more competent renderers of the original text than the Masorites who came some seven or eight hundred years after them.
But this is not the most important point of inquiry in this connection. The materialistic objector may say: "Admit all this; grant that the true rendering is here given; grant even that the true law of vegetal development and growth is here enunciated; what has 'star-eyed science' to do with the 'odium theologicum?'" We answer, nothing. We would bury both theological rancor and atheistical pretension in the same barrow, and agree never to "peep and botanize" over their common grave. But if a great scientific principle--one that fits into all the phenomenal facts of nature--explains them all, and is, in turn, explained by them--be found in the Hebrew Hagiographa, of what less value is it to science than if it had been originally enunciated by Aristotle or Plato? Or--to make the inquiry still sharper and more emphatic--of what less value is it to science than if it had originally come from Professor Tyndall or Mr. Herbert Spencer?
Take the "biblical genesis" as we have enunciated and explained it--with all the facts crowded into these explanatory pages--and science has no longer any genetic mystery to brood over, further than that every operation of nature is a mystery into which it is useless for scientific speculation to pry. We know what nature does, or may know it by the proper scrutiny, but we shall never know the causes of things, any more than we shall find God at the bottom of Herbert Spencer's crucible, or at the top of his ladder of synthesis. In the light of the Bible genesis, science can account for the origin of the stalwart oak or the lordly pine, without going back to any mycological or cryptogamic forms, to follow down an ever-changing vital plexus that is as likely to land in a buttonwood tree as an oak, or in a hemlock as a pine,--in fact, quite as likely to land in a carnivorous animal as in an insectivorous plant. "Let the earth bring forth," is still the eternal fiat,--just as implicitly obeyed to-day as it was in the world's primeval history, when an exuberance of endogenous vegetation laid the foundation of the coal measures. It requires no greater effort on the part of nature to produce the pine, the oak, the beech, the hickory--all of which we see springing directly from primordial germs to-day--than it did to produce the lowest vegetal organism, from an invisible, indestructible "vital unit," or Darwinian gemmule, thousands of years ago.
He who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and in whose sight a thousand years are but as yesterday, knows no such "law of variability" as our materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified theories of evolution, natural selection, selection of the fittest, rejection of the unfit--force-correlations, molecular machinery, transmutation of physical forces, differentiation, dynamical aggregates, molécules organiques, potentiated sky-mist, undifferentiated "life-stuff," and other hylotheistic and purely hypothetical formulæ, with which the average mind has been well-nigh crazed for the last fifteen or twenty years.
Believing that the time has come to call for "a halt" in scientific speculations, and a return to the phenomenal facts of nature as the true and only basis on which to formulate the immutable laws of life, matter, motion, etc., the writer submits this volume with trustful confidence to the public. [[1]]
R. W. Wright.
West Cheshire, Conn.