Sendivogius compares a plant with a mineral specimen.

A seed that might become a tree or a stone

Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636), a Polish alchemist and diplomat, asks in his New Light of Alchemy about the origin of things that hardly anyone would confuse in their finished state. A tree grows branches, a metal can be worked, and a stone may retain the same shape year after year. In his second treatise Sendivogius takes these differences back to a moment at which none of the eventual forms has yet become visible.

Before the first distinction

Now whilest the sperme is yet in the center, there may as easily be brought forth a tree, as a metall from the sperme, and assoone an hearbe, as a stone, and one more pretious then another, according to the purity of the place […].

– Michael Sendivogius, A New Light of Alchymie, 1650, p. 8.[1]

He assigns that moment a place. As long as the seed of nature remains at the centre of the earth, its destination is still open. The reader can follow this thought in the succession of examples. A tree is followed by a metal, a herb by a stone. The sentence gives these quite different things equal standing. Someone expecting a seed always to belong to a particular species of plant must revise that expectation at the second item in the list.

Where the seed arrives

The question then becomes what can give so open a beginning its eventual direction. In Sendivogius’s account of nature it matters where something goes and what it encounters there. The centre of the earth is significant precisely because the particular circumstances of a place of formation have yet to decide anything. A stone and a tree appear as two possible answers to the same initial question. Only from the vantage point of their finished shapes do their histories seem entirely separate from the first.