Besides the authors already quoted, and others who merely copied the narratives of their predecessors, Guillaume de Saluste, the Sieur du Bartas, accepted as authentic the story of the Vegetable Lamb. In his poem “La Semaine,” published in 1578, in which the first few days of the existence of all terrestrial things are described reverently and with considerable power, he represents this plant as one of those which excited the astonishment of the newly-created Adam as he wandered on the first day of the second week through the Garden of Eden, the earthly Paradise in which he had been placed.
“Or, confus, il se perd dans les tournoyements,
Embrouillées erreurs, courbez desvoyements,
Conduits virevoultez, et sentes desloyales
D’un Dedale infiny qui comprend cent Dedales,
Clos non de romarins dextrement cizelez
En hommes, my-chevaux, en courserots seelez,
En escaillez oyseaux, en balènes cornues,
Et mille autres façons de bestes incogneues,
Ains de vrays animaux en la terre plantez,
Humant l’air des poulmons, et d’herbes alimentez,
Tels que les Boramets, qui chez les Scythes naissent
D’une graine menues, et des plantes repaissent;
Bien que du corps, des yeux, de la bouche, et du nez,
Ils semblent des moutons qui sont naguières naiz.
Ils le seroient du vray, si dans l’alme poictrine
De terre ils n’enfonçoient une vive raçine
Qui tient à leur nombril, et tombe le meme jour
Quils ont brouttè le foin qui croissoit à l’entour,
O, merveilleux effect de dextre divine,
La plante a chair et sang, l’animal a raçine,
La plante comme en rond de soymême se meut,
L’animal a des pieds, et si marcher ne peut:
[18] La plante est sans rameaux, sans fruict, et sans feuillage,
L’animal sans amour, sans sexe, et vif lignage;
La plante a belles dents, paist son ventre affamè
Du fourrage voisin, l’animal est sémè.”
Joshua Sylvester, the admiring translator of Du Bartas,[11] gives the following version of the above lines:—
[11] ‘Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Workes, translated and dedicated to the King’s most excellent Maiestie by Joshua Sylvester, London. 1584.’
“Musing, anon through crooked walks he wanders,
Round winding rings, and intricate meanders.
False-guiding paths, doubtful, beguiling, strays,
And right-wrong errors of an endless maze;
Nor simply hedged with a single border
Of rosemary cut out with curious order
In Satyrs, Centaurs, Whales, and half-men-horses,
And thousand other counterfeited corses;
But with true beasts, fast in the ground still sticking
Feeding on grass, and th’ airy moisture licking,
Such as those Borametz in Scythia bred
Of slender seeds, and with green fodder fed;
Although their bodies, noses, mouths, and eyes,
Of new-yeaned lambs have full the form and guise,
And should be very lambs, save that for foot
Within the ground they fix a living root
Which at their navel grows, and dies that day
That they have browzed the neighbouring grass away.
Oh! wondrous nature of God only good,
The beast hath root, the plant hath flesh and blood.
The nimble plant can turn it to and fro,
The nummed beast can neither stir nor goe,
The plant is leafless, branchless, void of fruit,
The beast is lustless, sexless, fireless, mute:
The plant with plants his hungry paunch doth feede,
Th’ admired beast is sowen a slender seed.”
About the middle of the seventeenth century very little belief in the story of the “Scythian Lamb” remained amongst men of letters, although it continued to be a subject of discussion and research for at least a hundred and fifty years later.
Fig. 3.—Adam and Eve admiring the Plants in the Garden of Eden. The “Vegetable Lamb” in the background.
Fac-simile of the Frontispiece of Parkinson’s “Paradisus”