Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/572

262 growing on a stalk and eating the herbage, is one of the figures on the frontispiece of his Paradisi.

This was one of the most curious myths of the Middle Ages. It was also known as the Scythian Lamb and the Borametz or Barometz, the latter being derived from a Tartar word signifying "lamb." This "lamb" was supposed to be both a true animal and a living plant, and was supposed to grow in the territory of the Tartars of the East formerly called Scythia. According to some writers the lamb was the fruit of a tree, and when the fruit or seed pod of this tree was fully ripe it burst open and disclosed a little lamb perfect in every way. This was Sir John Mandeville's version. Other waiters described the lamb as being suspended above the ground by a stalk, flexible enough to allow the animal to feed on the herbage within its reach. When it had consumed all within its reach the stem withered and the lamb died. It was further reported that this lamb was a favourite food with wolves, but that no other carnivorous animals would attack it. So far as is known the story was first treated of in an English book by Sir John Mandeville, "the Knyght of Ingelond that was y bore in the town of Seynt Albans and travelide aboute in the worlde in many diverse countreis to se mervailes and customs of countreis and diversiteis of folkys and diverse shap of men and of beistis." It is in the chapter describing the curiosities he met with in the dominions of the "Cham" of Tartary that the passage about the Vegetable Lamb occurs. References to the Vegetable Lamb are also to be found in Histoire admirable des Plantes (1605) by Charles Buret, in The Journall of Frier Odoricus of Friuli in Hakluyt's Voyages, in De Spontanes Viventum Ortu (1518) by Fortunio Liceti, Professor of Philosophy at Padua, in Historia Naturae by Juan Ensebio Nieremberg, in De Rerum Natura (1557) by Cardano of Pavia, in Exotericarum Exercitationum by Julius Scaliger. Saluste, the Sieur du Bartas, in his poem La Semaine (1578) described the Vegetable Lamb as