So far, well! The identification of the material of which these imitations of four-legged animals were fashioned as the rhizome and frond-stalks of a tree-fern is complete, and perfectly satisfactory. But, having given to these root-stocks of tree-ferns the full benefit of an acknowledgment of the economic uses that have been made of them in various ways and in different localities, and having frankly stated the still accepted theory of their connection with the myth of the “Vegetable Lamb of Scythia,” I have to express my very decided opinion that they and the “lambs” (?) made from them had no more to do with the origin of the fable of the “_Barometz_” than the artificial mermaids so cleverly made by the Japanese have had to do with the origin of the belief in fish-tailed human beings and divinities. In the first place, as we shall presently see, these manipulated ferns were not intended by those who fashioned them to resemble lambs at all. Secondly, if they had been intended to represent the lamb of the fable, they could have been, like the Japanese mermaids, only the outcome and illustration of the legend--not the objects which first gave rise to it. Neither the one nor the other of these counterfeit fabrications appears to have been ever common; and neither was certainly manufactured in sufficient numbers, nor distributed so abundantly and completely over the habitable globe, as to have laid the foundation of a myth which in the one case was universally believed,[24] and in the other attracted attention all over Europe and Western Asia, and also in Egypt. Very few of the Japanese artificial mermaids have been seen in this country, though they have been eagerly sought for, and the fern-“lambs” that have been brought to England may be counted on one’s fingers.[25] [24] See the Chapter on “Mermaids” by the Author in ‘Sea Fables Explained,’ one of the Handbooks issued by the Authorities of the Great International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883. London. Clowes and Sons, Limited.