The beginning of the Oriental fable of the Vegetable Lamb is lost in the dateless night of the centuries. When and how it originated we know not; but the story of a Plant-Animal in Western Asia descended through the ages, and passed from traveller to traveller, from historian to historian, until in our time the fable has received a practical verification. Many strange things were gravely recorded of this Plant-Animal: as, that it was a tree bearing seed-pods, which, bursting when ripe, disclosed within little lambs with soft white fleeces, which Scythians used for weaving into clothing. Or, that it was a real flesh-and-blood lamb, growing upon a short stem flexible enough to allow the lamb to feed upon the surrounding grass. There were many versions of the marvellous tale as it reached Europe; and the compiler and concocter of the so-called Sir John Mandeville's travels, as usual, improved upon it. He vouched for the flesh-and-blood lamb growing out of a plant, and declared that he had both seen and _eaten it_--whereby the writer proved himself a somewhat greater romancer than usual. Nevertheless, he has a germ of truth amid his lies, for he relates of 'Bucharia' that in the land are 'trees that bear wool, as though it were of sheep, whereof men make clothes and all things that are made of wool.' And again, of Abyssinia, that mysterious kingdom of the renowned Prester John, he related: 'In that country, and in many others beyond, and also in many on this side, men sow the seeds of cotton, and they sow it every year; and then it grows into small trees which bear cotton. And so do men every year, so that there is plenty of cotton at all times.' This statement, whencesoever it was borrowed, may be true enough, and if so, is evidence that, eighteen centuries after Herodotus, cotton was still being cultivated, as the basis of a textile industry, both in Western Asia and in Africa. It is said that in the Sacred Books of India there is evidence that cotton was in use for clothing purposes eight centuries before Christ. The expedition of Alexander the Great from Persia into the Punjab was a good deal later, say, three hundred and thirty years before Christ. On the retreat down the Indus, Admiral Nearchus remarked 'trees bearing as it were flocks or bunches of wool,' of which the natives made 'garments of surpassing whiteness, or else their black complexions make the material whiter than any other.' The Alexandrine general, Aristobulus, is more precise: he tells of a wool-bearing tree yielding a capsule that contains 'seeds which were taken out, and that which remained was carded like wool.' And long before Pliny referred to cotton in Egypt--'a shrub which men call "gossypium," and others "xylon," from which stuffs are made which we call xylina'--Strabo had noted the cultivation of the plant on the Persian Gulf.