The plant that set all Europe talking of the lambs that grew in fruits and on stalks of plants somewhere in Scythia was one of far higher importance and value to mankind than the childish knick-knacks made for amusement out of the creeping root-stocks of ferns. These and the curly-fleeced progeny of the poor ewes of Astrachan were lambs that crossed the track of the first, lost lamb, and led those searching for it into the mistake of following their respective trails, whilst the original “Scythian Lamb” escaped from sight. Tracing the growth and transition of this story of the lamb-plant from a truthful rumour of a curious fact into a detailed history of an absurd fiction, I have no doubt whatever that it originated in early descriptions of the cotton plant, and the introduction of cotton from India into Western Asia and the adjoining parts of Eastern Europe. Herodotus, writing (B.C. 445) of the usages of the people of India, says (lib. iii. cap. 106) of this cotton:--“Certain trees bear for their fruit fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom.” In the 47th chapter of the same book, Herodotus describes a corselet sent by Aahmes (or Amasis) II., King of Egypt, to Sparta as having been “ornamented with gold and _fleeces from the trees_”--padded with cotton, in fact. Ctesias, also, who was the contemporary of Herodotus, and was made prisoner, and kept by the King of Persia as his court physician for seventeen years, was acquainted with the use of a kind of wool, the produce of trees, for spinning and weaving amongst the natives of India, for he mentions in his ‘_Indica_’ a fragment quoted by Photius, “tree-garments”; and that he thus referred to clothing made from these tree-fleeces we have the testimony of Varro:--“Ctesias says that there are in India _trees that bear wool_.” Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, reported that “there were in India trees bearing, as it were, flocks or bunches of wool, and that the natives made of this wool garments of surpassing whiteness, or else their black complexions made the material appear whiter than any other.” Aristobulus, another of Alexander’s generals, made mention in his journal of the cotton plant, under the name of “the wool-bearing tree,” and stated that “it bore a capsule that contained seeds which were taken out, and that which remained was carded like wool.” Strabo, who records this (lib. xv. cap. 21), referring to it in another paragraph, writes:--“Nearchus says that their (the natives’) fine clothing was made from this wool, and that the Macedonians used it for mattresses and the stuffing of their saddles.”[28]