The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant. To Which Is Added a Sketch of the History of Cotton and the Cotton Trade

"The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant" by Henry Lee is a study that traces the unbelievable story of the Vegetable Lamb, a mythical creature thought to be part plant and part animal, producing lambs as fruit. Lee investigates the beginnings of this fable and its link to the real cotton plant, clarifying misunderstandings in the Middle Ages. The book begins by detailing descriptions of this mythological creature as both fruit-bearing tree-lambs and living lambs connected to the ground. Lee talks about how these stories grew and spread from ancient historical accounts to the ideas of medieval writers which leads to misrepresenting the true origins of the cotton plant. This establishes a base for analyzing the link between truth, folklore, and how myths began about the origins of cotton in Western Europe.