Then comes Pliny, who, incompetent and worthless as a naturalist, though admirable as a writer, obscured this subject, as he did many others. In his ‘Natural History’[32] he mentions cotton in four different paragraphs, and in every one of them inaccurately. He confuses cotton with flax, and the fabrics woven of it with linen, and treats of silk as a downy substance scraped from the leaves of trees. And, in transcribing, or translating, the passage from Theophrastus relating to the “wool-bearing trees,” he distorts the author’s words, and states that “these trees bear _gourds_ the size of a quince, which burst when ripe, and display balls of wool out of which the inhabitants make cloths like valuable linen.” Pliny therefore seems to have been the author of the “gourd” portion of the story which afterwards obtained currency in Western Europe. [32] ‘_Naturalis Historia_,’ A.D. 77. I shall quote one more ancient mention of the “fleece-bearing plant,” because the author of it gives a more exact description than any previous writer of that portion of it from which the wool is taken. Julius Pollux, who wrote about a hundred years later than Pliny, says in his ‘Onomasticon’:-- “There are also _Byssina_ and _Byssus_, a kind of flax. But among the Indians a sort of wool is obtained from a tree. The cloth made from this wool may be compared with linen, except that it is thicker. The tree produces a fruit most nearly resembling a walnut, but three-cleft. After the outer covering, which is like a walnut, has divided and become dry, the substance resembling wool is extracted, and is used in the manufacture of cloth.” This remark, of the pericarp of the cotton-pod, in some species of _Gossypium_, being three-cleft, is in accordance with fact, and is not noticed by any previous writer. In tracing the development of these early and truthful accounts of the cotton-plant into the complete fable of the compound plant-animal, the “Vegetable Lamb of Scythia,” we shall find it, as in the case of some other myths of the Middle Ages, attributable to two principal causes:-- 1. The misinterpretation of ambiguous or figurative language; 2. The similarity of appearance of two actually different and incongruous objects.