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Dave's Mythical Creatures and Places |
Lamb Tree
| Description | A
lamb that is grown from a plant. It remains attached to the plant
through a cord in the navel. The lamb can graze within the length of
the cord, but when it eats all the vegetation within reach, it dies. An
alternative description is of a plant that has little pods that, when
opened, has little lambs inside.
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| Features | The meat
of this lamb tastes like fish, and its blood tastes like honey. Wolves are
fond of it.
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| Also called | Barbary
Lamb, Barmotez, Tartary lamb, Vegetable lamb, or
Lycopodium Barometz
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| Described By: | Sir John
Mandeville- " there groweth a manner of fruite as it were gourds,
and when it is ripe men cut it a sonder, and men fynde therein a beast as
it were of fleshe and bone and bloud, ass it were a lyttle lambe without
wolle, and men eate the beaste and fruit also, and sure it seemeth very
strange."
Claude Douret- " a zoophyte, or plant animal, called in the Hebrew Jeduah. It was in form like a lamb, and from its navel, grew a stem or root by which this Zoophyte, or plant-animal, was fixed attached, like a gourd to the soil below the surface of the ground, and, according to the length of its stem or root, it devoured all the herbage which it was able to reach within the circle of its tether. The hunters who went in search of this creature were unable to capture, or remove it, until they had succeeded in cutting the stem by well-aimed arrows, or darts, when the animal immediately fell prostrate to the earth, and died. Its bones being placed with certain ceremonies and incantations in the mouth of one desiring to foretell the future, he was instantly siezed with a gift of divination, and endowed with the gift of prophesy." (Historie Admirable des Plantes, 1605)
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