In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vegetable lamb leapt off the pages of natural historical description and into Baroque cabinets of curiosity. Preserved specimens from Tartary began appearing in European collections, alongside geodes, starfish, fossils, animal skulls, amulets, shrunken heads, and any other imponderabilia that caught a collector’s eye. In 1698, the Irish naturalist Sir Hans Sloane saw one of these specimens up close and looked at it awry. He had obtained the alleged corpse, preserved through desiccation, from one Mr. Buckley, Chief Surgeon at Fort St. George, East Indies, who had shipped it in a cabinet of various Chinese medical instruments and curios from the city known today as Chennai, India. Sloane noted that this specimen’s supposed feet looked “exactly like the foot-stalks of ferns, both without and within”, and that the supposed wool was nothing more than the fine rhizomes of this fern. He offered that such vegetable tufts, natural anticoagulants, were used in places like Jamaica to stop bleeding. Sloane is the first to suggest that vegetable lambs may merely be fern root clusters, dried and crafted into lamblike shapes to satisfy the curiosity of gullible Europeans. “It seem’d to be shap’d by Art to imitate a Lamb, the Roots or climbing part is made to resemble the Body, and the extant Foot-stalks the Legs.”
