64 ff. It was supposed that the pearl-bearing shell-fish opened at low tide to receive the dew-drops from which the pearls grew. 74. _ȝif ȝou lyke_, 'if it please you', impersonal = French _si vous plest_. 75. _þe Lapidarye_, Latin _Lapidarium_, was a manual of precious stones, which contained a good deal of pseudo-scientific information about their natures and virtues, just as the _Bestiary_ summed up popular knowledge of animals. A Latin poem by Marbod bishop of Rennes (d. 1123) is the chief source of the mediaeval lapidaries, and, curiously enough, there is a French prose text attributed by so intimate an authority as Jean d'Outremeuse to Mandeville himself. Several Old French texts have been edited by L. Pannier, _Les Lapidaires Français du Moyen Âge_, Paris 1882. Their high repute may be judged from the inclusion of no less than seven copies in the library of Charles V of France (d. 1380); and it is surprising that no complete ME. version is known. But much of the matter was absorbed into encyclopaedic works like the _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ of Bartholomaeus, which Trevisa translated. 97. Mistranslated. The French has: _qi sont violastre, ou pluis broun qe violettes_. 100-1. _But in soth to me_: French: _Mes endroit de moy_, 'but for my part'; the English translator has rendered _en droit_ separately. 108. _þerfore_: the context requires the sense 'because', but the translator would hardly have used _þerfore_ had he realized that ll. 108-9 correspond to a subordinate clause in the French, and do not form a complete independent sentence. He was misled by the bad punctuation of some French MSS., e.g. Royal 20 B. X and (with consequent corruption) Harley 4383. 136. _Cathaye_: China. See the classic work of Colonel Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, 2 vols., London 1866. The modernization of the Catalan map of 1375 in vol. i gives a good idea of Mandeville's geography. 142. _withouten wolle_: the story of the vegetable lamb is taken from the Voyage of Friar Odoric, which is accessible in Hakluyt's _Voyages_. Hakluyt's translation is reprinted, with the Eastern voyages of John de Plano Carpini (1246) and of William de Rubruquis (1253), in _The Travels of Sir John Mandeville_, ed. A. W. Pollard, London 1900. The legend probably arose from vague descriptions of the cotton plant; and Mandeville makes it still more marvellous by describing as without wool the lamb which had been invented to explain the wool's existence. 143-4. _Of þat frute I haue eten_: This assertion seems to be due to the English translator. The normal French text has simply: _et cest bien grant meruaille de ceo fruit, et si est grant oure [= oeuvre] de nature_ (MS. Royal 20 B. X, f. 70 b).