The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant. / To Which Is Added a Sketch of the History of Cotton and the Cotton Trade

by Henry Lee

Juan de Loureiro, an accomplished Portuguese botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Lisbon, who lived and laboured as a Catholic missionary for more than thirty years in Cochin China, and, afterwards, for three years in China, thus writes[27]:—

[27] Flora Cochinchinensis, tom. i. p. 675. Lisbon. 1790.

“The Polypodium borametz grows in hilly woods in China and Cochin China. Many authors have written of the Scythian Lamb, or Borametz—most of them fabulously. Ours is not a fruit, but a root, which is easily shaped by the help of a little art into the form of a small rufous dog, by which name, and not by that of a ‘lamb,’ it is called by the Chinese.”

Loureiro describes the cutting off the stalks to form the legs, the fixing on of smaller ones as ears, and other particulars of the rude manufacture of these fern-root dogs, as witnessed by himself. The common name of these toys in China—“Cau-tich,” and in Cochin China, “Kew-tsie,” both represent a “tan-coloured dog.”

It must also be borne in mind that the lamb-plant was represented as springing from a seed like that of a melon, but rounder, and that the natives of the country where it grew planted these seeds. It was therefore a cultivated plant. The lamb, it was also stated, was contained within the fruit or seed-capsule of the plant; and when this fruit, or seed-pod, was ripe it burst open, and the little lamb within it was disclosed. The wool of this lamb was described by various writers as being “very white,” “as white as snow,” whereas these root-stocks of ferns bear no resemblance to a lamb in their natural condition; and when they have been deftly trimmed into shape the hairs or scales upon them are tawny orange, matching better with the “tan” markings of a dog, which they were intended to represent, than with the soft, white fleece of a young lamb.

Therefore, even if I had no better explanation to offer, I should be led to the conclusion that the identification of these tawny toy-dogs, made in China from the root of a wild fern, the spores of which are as small as dust, with the “Vegetable Lambs” of Scythia, whose white fleeces were found within the ripe and opening fruit of a cultivated plant, raised from a large seed, was obviously erroneous, and that the origin of the rumour must be sought for elsewhere.

The plant that set all Europe talking of the lambs that grew in fruits and on stalks of plants somewhere in Scythia was one of far higher importance and value to mankind than the childish knick-knacks made for amusement out of the creeping root-stocks of ferns. These and the curly-fleeced progeny of the poor ewes of Astrachan were lambs that crossed the track of the first, lost lamb, and led those searching for it into the mistake of following their respective trails, whilst the original “Scythian Lamb” escaped from sight.

Tracing the growth and transition of this story of the lamb-plant from a truthful rumour of a curious fact into a detailed history of an absurd fiction, I have no doubt whatever that it originated in early descriptions of the cotton plant, and the introduction of cotton from India into Western Asia and the adjoining parts of Eastern Europe.

Herodotus, writing (B.C. 445) of the usages of the people of India, says (lib. iii. cap. 106) of this cotton:—“Certain trees bear for their fruit fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom.”