The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Alice F. Tryon, American Fern Journal, Vol. 47 / No. 1, 1957).
Tryon's article begins by tracing the image of the vegetable lamb through some of its most notable appearances in literature. She begins with Rabbi Jochanan in 436, moves through its medieval manifestations in a 1235 work by a "commentator" on the Scriptures - John Mandeville ("something of an English Ulysses") - Friar Odoric - and then, Claude Duret, in his Histoire Admirable des Plantes. She then briefly mentions its reception in 16th and 17th century academic circles, citing Kircher of Avignon and Girolamo Cardana of Pavia as her examples. Tryon documents Dutch East India Company surgeon Dr. Kaempfer's attempts to find the creature, and then Sir Hans Sloane's success (he "laid the object before the scientific world" as he presented a specimen to the Royal Society of London).
The remainder of the article, appropriately enough for the American Fern Journal, decidedly states that the specimen provided by Sloane was actually "a portion of a fern plant that grows in southern China" (Cibotium barometz). Essentially, the ferns, which are actually a type of fern tree reaching 15 feet in height, bear clusters of fronds with trunks that are covered in long "hairs". A portion of the trunk is cut and the fronds cut to resemble appendages; the addition of seeds to represent eyes produces a piece of animalistic folk-art that much resembles a lamb (or other small animal). As I mentioned in my brief summary of the equally brief Tree-Wool article, this is one of two prevalent explanations for the origin of the vegetable lamb myth, the other being a simple conflation of "trees" and "lambs" in a misunderstanding of then-exotic cotton.
Tryon also includes the pretty bit of verse by Erasmus Darwin which I've mentioned in other entries, and I'll include it here because it's quite nice:
Cradled in snow, and fanned by Arctic air,
Shines, gentle Barometz, thy golden hair;
Rooted in earth, each cloven hoof descends,
And round and round her flexile neck she bends,
Crops the gray 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'.
(Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden)
