The Zoophyte of Tartary – The Public Domain Review

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vegetable lamb jumped from the pages of natural history descriptions to baroque curio cabinets. Preserved specimens from Tartaria began to appear in European collections, alongside geodes, starfish, fossils, animal skulls, amulets, shrunken heads, and other imponderabilia that caught a collector’s eye. In 1698, Irish naturalist Sir Hans Sloane saw one of these specimens up close and took a wrong look at it. He had received the alleged corpse, which had been preserved by dehydration, from a Mr. Buckley, chief surgeon of Fort St. George, East Indies, who had shipped it in a cabinet containing various Chinese medical instruments and curiosities from the city now known as Chennai, India. Sloane noted that the supposed feet of this specimen “exactly resembled the foot-stalks of ferns, both without and within,” and that the supposed wool was nothing more than the fine rhizomes of this fern. He suggested that such vegetable tufts, natural anticoagulants, were used in places like Jamaica to stop bleeding. Sloane is the first to suggest that vegetable lambs are merely bunches of fern roots, dried and made into lamb-like shapes to satisfy the curiosity of gullible Europeans. “It appears that it has been sculpted by art to imitate a lamb, the roots or climbing part are made to resemble the body, and the existing foot stems are the legs.”