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 — A Reader’s Guide

From Fable to Fern: Tracing the Barometz

The excerpts reveal that Lee’s method is forensic. He recounts how the fable was long explained as originating from “little lamb-like toy figures” made from the rhizome of a tree-fern, Dicksonia Barometz. But Lee, while preparing his earlier books on sea monsters, found passages in old authors that made him doubt this accepted explanation. The excerpts do not disclose his alternative conclusion, but they show his reliance on historical illustrations—such as those by Joannes Zahn, Sir John Mandeville, and Claude Duret—and on specimens submitted to the Royal Society by Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Breyn. Lee’s approach is to compare visual and textual evidence across centuries, a method he had already applied to marine myths.

Cotton’s Ancient Trail: India, Persia, and the Palace of Shushan

The second half of the book, as sampled, is a detailed economic and philological history. Lee traces the word “Kupas” (cotton with seed) from Sanskrit to Latin carbasus, and notes its appearance in the Book of Esther (i. 6) as “Karpas,” which he argues should be rendered “cotton-cloth” rather than “green.” He describes the blue-and-white striped cotton hangings of Ahasuerus’s palace, comparing them to Indian “purdahs” still in use. Lee also quotes Strabo on Susiana’s heat and the introduction of the vine by Macedonians, but admits he cannot find Strabo’s statement that cotton grew there—a rare moment of scholarly caution. The narrative weaves together biblical, classical, and contemporary sources to argue for a very early Indian cotton industry and its spread westward.

Catalog Categories and the Book’s Actual Content

The Project Gutenberg record classifies this work under “Plants – Folklore” and “Cotton – History,” with a secondary topic of “botany.” The excerpts bear out both subjects, but not equally. The folklore section occupies only the first chapter (and the preface), while the cotton history fills the remainder. The botanical content is minimal: the fern rhizome is described as a crafted object, not a living plant. Lee’s voice is that of a Victorian naturalist and antiquarian, more concerned with textual criticism and trade routes than with plant biology. Readers expecting a unified botanical fable may find the book’s structure lopsided. The catalog subjects are accurate but mask the work’s true weight: a detailed commercial history prefaced by a curious myth.

Lee’s book rewards readers who enjoy following a single thread—the word “cotton” or the image of a lamb-plant—across centuries and continents. The excerpts show a writer comfortable with Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit etymologies, and willing to admit when evidence is missing. Approach the volume as two distinct essays bound together: a short detective story about a medieval hoax, followed by a longer treatise on a global commodity. The illustrations, though not reproduced here, are clearly integral to Lee’s argument. For the fullest experience, read with a map of ancient trade routes at hand.

I’ve always treasured how Henry Lee’s Vegetable Lamb turns a strange old fable into a quiet thread of human wonder, weighty as cotton itself. That same gentle curiosity lives in Household stories from the Land of Hofer; or, Popular Myths of Tirol — Reading Companion, where mountain legends feel like whispered hearth-smoke. Both books, in their odd corners, remind me how patiently people weave meaning from the ordinary world.