The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz) is a legend

Legend

A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude...

ary zoophyte

Zoophyte

A zoophyte is an animal that visually resembles a plant. An example is a sea anemone. The name is obsolete in modern science.Zoophytes are common in medieval and renaissance era herbals, notable examples including the Tartar Lamb, a plant which grew sheep as fruit...

 of central Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

, believed to grow sheep as its fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

. The sheep were connected to the plant by an umbilical cord

Umbilical cord

In placental mammals, the umbilical cord is the connecting cord from the developing embryo or fetus to the placenta...

 and grazed the land around the plant. When all the plants were gone, both the plant and sheep died.

Although it owed its currency in medieval

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 thought as a way of explaining the existence of cotton

Cotton

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....

, underlying the myth is a real plant, Cibotium barometz

Cibotium barometz

Cibotium barometz, golden chicken fern, woolly fern, is a species of tree fern native to parts of China and to the western part of the Malay Peninsula...

, a fern

Fern

A fern is any one of a group of about 12,000 species of plants belonging to the botanical group known as Pteridophyta. Unlike mosses, they have xylem and phloem . They have stems, leaves, and roots like other vascular plants...

 of the genus Cibotium

Cibotium

Cibotium is a genus of eleven species of tropical tree fern—subject to much confusion and revision—distributed fairly narrowly in Hawaii , Southeast Asia , and the cloud forests of Central America and Mexico...

. It was known under various other names including the Scythia

Scythia

In antiquity, Scythian or Scyths were terms used by the Greeks to refer to certain Iranian groups of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists who dwelt on the Pontic-Caspian steppe...

n Lamb, the Borometz, Barometz and Borametz, the latter three being different spellings of the local word for lamb. The 'lamb' is produced by removing the leaves from a short length of the fern's woolly rhizome

Rhizome

In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...

. When the rhizome is inverted, it fancifully resembles a woolly lamb with the legs being formed by the severed petiole bases. The Tradescant Museum of Garden History

Museum of Garden History

The Garden Museum, formerly known as the Museum of Garden History, is based in the deconsecrated parish church of St Mary-at-Lambeth adjacent to Lambeth Palace on the south bank of the River Thames in London, located on Lambeth Road...

 has one under glass.

Characteristics

In his book, The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (1887), Henry Lee describes the legendary lamb as believed to be both a true animal and a living plant. However, he states that some writers believed the lamb to be the fruit of a plant, sprouting forward from melon-like seeds. Others however believed the lamb to be a living member of the plant that once separated from it, would perish. The vegetable lamb was believed to have blood, bones, and flesh like that of a normal lamb. It was connected to the earth by a stem similar to an umbilical cord that propped the lamb up above ground. The cord could flex downward allowing the lamb to feed on the grass and plants surrounding it. Once the plants within reach were eaten, the lamb died. It could be eaten once dead, and its blood supposedly tasted sweet like honey. Its wool was said to be used by the native people of its homeland to make head coverings and other articles of clothing. The only carnivorous animals attracted to the lamb-plant (other than humans) were wolves.

Possible origins

There is mention of a similar plant-animal in Jewish folklore as early as 436 CE. This creature, called the Yeduah, was like a lamb in form and sprouted from the earth connected to a stem. Those who went hunting the Yeduah could only harvest the creature by severing it from its stem with arrows or darts. Once the animal was severed, it died and its bones could be used in divination and prophetic ceremonies.

An alternative version of the legend tells of the "Faduah", a human-shaped plant-animal connected to the earth from a stem attached to its navel. The Faduah was believed to be aggressive though, grabbing and killing any creature that wandered too close. Like the Barometz, it too died once severed from its stem.

The Minorite Friar Odoricus of Friuli, upon recalling first hearing of a Barometz, told of trees on the shore of the Irish Sea with gourd-like fruits that fell into the water and became birds called Bernacles. He is referring to the legendary plant-animal, the Barnacle Tree which was believed to drop its ripened fruit into the sea near the Orkney Islands. The ripened fruit would then release “barnacle geese

Barnacle Goose

The Barnacle Goose belongs to the genus Branta of black geese, which contains species with largely black plumage, distinguishing them from the grey Anser species...

” that would live in the water, growing to mature geese. The alleged existence of this fellow plant-animal was accepted as an explanation for migrating geese from the North.

In his work The Shui-yang or Watersheep and The Agnus Scythicus or Vegetable Lamb (1892), Gustav Schlegel points to Chinese legends of the "watersheep" as inspiration for the legend of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Much like the vegetable lamb, the watersheep was believed to be both plant and animal and tales of its existence placed it near Persia. It was connected to the ground by a stem and if the stem were severed, it would die. The animal was protected from aggressors by an enclosure built around it and by armored men yelling and beating drums. Its wool was also said to be used for fine clothing and headdresses. (In turn, the origin of watersheep is an explanation for sea silk

Sea silk

Sea silk is an extremely fine, rare and valuable fabric produced from the long silky filaments or byssus secreted by a gland in the foot of several bivalve molluscs by which they attach themselves to the sea bed....

).

In search of the legend

Earlier versions of the legend tell of the lamb as a fruit, springing from a melon or gourd-like seed, perfectly formed as if born naturally. As time passed, this idea was replaced with the notion that the creature was indeed both a living animal and a living plant. Gustav Schlegel, in his work on the various legends of the vegetable lamb, recounts the lamb being born without its horns, but with two puffs of white, curly hair instead.

Sir John Mandeville

John Mandeville

"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book account of his supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and first circulated between 1357 and 1371.By aid of translations into many other languages...

 is credited with bringing the legend to public attention in England in the 14th century during the reign of King Edward III. Mandeville returned from Tartary describing a strange gourd-like fruit grown there. Once ripe, the fruit was cut open, revealing what looked like a lamb in flesh and blood but lacking wool. The fruit and the lamb could then be eaten.

Friar Odoric of Friuli, much like Mandeville, travelled extensively and claimed to have heard of gourds in Persia that when ripe, opened to contain lamb-like beasts.
In the mid 16th century, Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein

Sigismund von Herberstein

Siegmund Freiherr von Herberstein, , was an Carniolan diplomat, writer, historian and member of the Holy Roman Empire Imperial Council...

, who in 1517 and 1526 was the Ambassador to the Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, presented a much more detailed account of the Barometz in his "Notes on Russia". He claimed to have heard from too many credible sources to doubt the lamb’s existence, and gave the location of the creature as being near the Caspian Sea, between the Jaick and Volga rivers. The creature grown from the melon-like seeds described was said to grow to two and half feet high (80 cm), resembling a lamb in most ways except a few. It was said to have blood, but not true flesh as it more closely resembled that of a crab. Unlike a normal lamb, its hooves were said to be made of parted hair. It was the favourite food of wolves and other animals.

The German scholar and physician Engelbert Kaempfer

Engelbert Kaempfer

Engelbert Kaempfer , a German naturalist and physician is known for his tour of Russia, Persia, India, South-East Asia, and Japan between 1683 and 1693. He wrote two books about his travels...

 accompanied an embassy to Persia in 1683 with the intention of locating the lamb. After speaking with native inhabitants and finding no physical evidence of the lamb-plant, Kaempfer concluded it to be nothing but legend. However, he observed the custom of removing an unborn lamb from its mother’s womb in order to harvest the soft wool and believed the practice to be a possible source of the legend. He speculated further that museum specimens of the fetal wool could be mistaken for a vegetable substance.

In poetry

In Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s work Botanic Garden (1781), he writes of the Borametz:

E'en round the Pole the flames of love aspire,

And icy bosoms feel the secret fire,

Cradled in snow, and fanned by Arctic air,

Shines, gentle borametz, thy golden hair

Rooted in earth, each cloven foot descends,

And round and round her flexile neck she bends,

Crops the grey coral moss, and hoary thyme,

Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime;

Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam,

And seems to bleat - a vegetable lamb

Guillaume de Saluste, the Sieur du Bartas, writes of the vegetable lamb in his poem La Semaine (1587). In the poem, Adam wanders the Garden of Eden and is amazed by the peculiarity of the creature. Joshua Sylvester translates:

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 neighboring 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.

In his work Connubia Florum, Latino Carmine Demonstrata (1791), Dr. De la Croix writes of the vegetable lamb (translated):

For in his path he sees a monstrous birth,

The Borametz arises from the earth

Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,

A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit,

…It is an animal that sleeps by day

And wakes at night, though rooted in the ground,

To feed on grass within its reach around.

Cultural references

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....

 wrote an article about the Agnus Scythicus in the first edition of his Encyclopédie

Encyclopédie

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...

. Some see it as a thinly-veiled criticism of the blind belief associated with religion. It also acts as an endorsement for viewing all phenomena scientifically.

The Borometz appears in Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

' Book of Imaginary Beings

Book of Imaginary Beings

Jorge Luis Borges wrote and edited the Book of Imaginary Beings in 1957 as the original Spanish Manual de zoología fantástica, or Handbook of Fantastic Zoology, expanding it in 1967 and 1969 to the final El libro de los seres imaginarios...

.

In the PlayStation 2 game Odin Sphere

Odin Sphere

is a 2D fantasy action RPG video game. Developed by Vanillaware and localized and published by Atlus for the PlayStation 2 in 2007, it tells the interlocking stories of five different protagonists. Odin Sphere is considered a spiritual successor to an Atlus game titled Princess Crown and takes some...

, Baromett seeds can be planted and grow to be plants that bear two sheep.

External links

• Legend of the Lamb-Plant
• Note to Sir Thomas Browne
  Thomas Browne
  Sir Thomas Browne was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric....
  
  , Pseudodoxia Epidemica, III.28
• Agnus scythicus (Natural history. Botany)