Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 542 (Color Image)

0542	Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1

culum was simile Agno sine lana seems to imply that his source was not Odoric, but Maundeville,
at least indirectly. Directly, his information was drawn from « Laurentius Servius in Chronica
Germ. anni 1504 » and « Jo. Maria Bonard. de miner. », of which I can trace neither for the present.

As to the name baranec and the fur used to make caps, an obvious solution is that Herber-
stein, perhaps in agreement with some Turkish tradition, transferred the legend to a local product,
in fact to the skin of the stillborn lamb or lamb obtained before birth by opening the belly of the
mother, our astrakhan. In 1692, the clearheaded Witsen (Noord en Oost-Tartarye, 1705 ed., I,
288), in a paragraph « De Agno Scyticâ, seu fructu Boronietz (Boranits) » had inserted with appro-
val a Latin note which he had received from Kaempfer, in which the latter stated that the « boro-
metz seu barannetz » could be nothing else but « the placenta of a lamb taken from the womb of
its mother ». This is already, almost word for word, the text which, a few years later (1712),
Kaempfer himself published in his Amoenitates Exoticae, fasc. III, 505-508. We have seen that,
in the 18th cent., the « sheep with heavy bones » of the Chinese, which, through a mistake in the
meaning of ku-chung yang, is the lineal descendant of the « sowed sheep », was no other than the
astrakhan. Moreover the fur caps made from the lamb plant, according to Postel's Turkish
informant, came from Samarkand, which is very near Bokhara, mentioned for the « sheep with
heavy bones » by the Chinese.

But this was too simple. In 1725, according to Bretschneider (Br, I, 154), Dr Breyn of
Danzig (this must be Johann Philip Breyn, whose works are not at my disposal; from bibliogra-
phies I cannot trace any book of his which is dated 1725) declared that the pretended Agnus
scythicus was nothing more than the rhizome of a large fern, which, once placed in an inverted
position, had the appearance of the legs and horns of a quadruped; specimens of that fern, known
as penghawar, were artificially made to have a still closer resemblance to the animal, and magical
properties were attributed to it. The great Linnaeus, having received in 1752 a certain fern from
southern China, had no hesitation in declaring it to be the Agnus scythicus, and called it Polypo-
dium barometz. Modern botanists have also used the term Aspidium barometz, but prefer Cibo-
tium barometz. Such would be the Agnus Scythicus. « Adam and Eve were said to have been
astonished on seeing this vegetable lamb in the Garden of Eden » (Stuart, Materia Medica, 345).
In one of the very spare footnotes added to his translation of Herberstein, Major accepted the
Polypodium theory. As to Boullon's Dictionnaire de botanique, almost every word under the
headings « Agneau de Scythie » and « Barometz » is a glaring error. So barometz, miscopied from
Herberstein's « boranetz », became universally adopted in botanical nomenclature. The Russians
corrected the form of the word, but not the value, and now baranec is the Russian
designation of a Polypodium, just as barometz is in the rest of the world. No botanist paid attention
to the fact that this fern, extensively found in south-eastern Asia and said to occur in the moun-
tainous regions of Central Asia, did not grow in the very country from which the pseudo-name
barometz had been imported.

Lee (pp. 24-44) has already exposed the absurdity of the fern story, but we have now to
account for the whole legend in its various forms, without stopping at Brückner's hypothesis of
a solar myth (p. 144).

In 1871, Bretschneider (On the knowledge possessed by the ancient Chinese, 24) suggested

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National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books