eyes marked; the head, neck, breast, wings, tail, and feet formed, the feathers everywhere perfectly shaped and blackish-coloured, and the feet like those of other water-fowl.” This nonsense was published in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (No. 137, January and February, 1678) under the auspices of the highest representatives of science in this country. The old botanist Gerard had previously (in 1597) had the audacity to assert that he had witnessed the transformation of the “shell-fish” into geese.[34] [33] See Appendix G. [34] See ‘Sea Fables Explained,’ by the Author, 2nd edition, p. 114. Clowes and Sons, Limited. In like manner the “wool-bearing plant” of Ctesias, Nearchus, Aristobulus, and Theophrastus, the plant of which Herodotus wrote that “it bore as its fruit fleeces which surpassed those of lambs in beauty and excellence,” was soon reported to be “a plant bearing fruit within which was a little lamb having a fleece of surpassing beauty and excellence.” As it was evident that a living lamb must take food, the “lytylle best” was, in the next version, kindly placed upon a stalk, and so balanced thereon as to be able to bend downward, and browze upon the surrounding herbage. Of course the lamb, if it fed on grass, must have digestive and other organs, like those of lambs ordinarily begotten, so these were liberally bestowed upon it with as much particularity as that exercised by Sir Robert Moray in enumerating the “parts and features” of the “little tree-bird.”[35] The transformation of the wondrous “plant-animal” from “a little lamb with a white fleece disclosed by the bursting of a ripe seed-pod growing on a stalk” into “a lamb growing on a stalk attached to its navel, and browzing on the herbage within its reach,” vastly increased the difficulty of identifying it. Like the barnacle geese, it was discussed by philosophers and sought for by travellers; but its features had been distorted beyond recognition, and, instead of endeavouring to find its original portrait in the pages of old historians and geographers, enquirers looked for fresh information concerning it in the misleading tales of successive travellers. At last, as we have seen, another “vegetable lamb” crossed the trail of the original lost one, in the shape of the two Chinese toy-dogs laid before the Royal Society by Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Breyn. That distinguished body of savants unfortunately accorded their recognition to the wrongful claimant, and ever since then botanists and antiquarians have regarded the problem as solved, and have been satisfied that in these few rude models of “tan-coloured dogs” they have found the true and original “snow-white” “Vegetable Lamb of Scythia.”