1629. I have both the Parkinsons. The first published of the two has the following curious descriptive inscription written on a shield at the bottom of the title-page:Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris.

A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up: with

A Kitchen garden of all manner of herres, ravies, and fruites for meate or sause used with us,

And

An Orchard of all sorts of fruit-rearing trees and Shrubrs fit fob our land,

Together

With the bight orderinge, planting, and presarving of them, and their uses and vertues. Collected by John Parkinson, Apothecary of London.

The picture on the title-page portrays the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve tending the flowers.

The outward edge is rimmed with spikes representing the sun's rays. At the top is the eye of Providence, and on each side a cherub symbolising the winds. In the centre of the. garden is the famous Vegetable Lamb, supposed to be half animal and half plant. This curious myth of the Middle Ages lingered on, and was actually discussed as a matter of faith by scientific men towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Borametz, or Scythian Lamb, or Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, as described by travellers, appears in both the frontispieces of Parkinson's books. When studying the flower books at the South Kensington Museum, I felt curious about this tradition, which the Church of the Middle Ages took up, making it a matter of faith that the Vegetable Lamb grew in Paradise and was in some mysterious way typical of the Christian Lamb. My brain was soon cleared by finding at the Museum a book written by Mr. Henry Lee, and published as late as 1887, giving an excellent account of the whole tradition. This book, called 'The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary/ contains several pictures, reproduced from old books, of the lamb. Some represent it growing, as Parkinson has it, on a stem, from which it was supposed to eat the grass as far as it could reach and then die. Another picture is of a tree with large cocoons, which burst open and display a lamb. The belief seems to have been that the lamb was at the same time both a true animal and a living plant. Mr. Lee carefully goes through the whole tradition, quoting all the known sources from which it arose. According to him, about the middle of the seventeenth century very little belief in the story of the Scythian Lamb remained among men of letters, although it continued to be a subject of discussion and research for at least a hundred and fifty years later. He sums up his explanation with the following sentence:- 'Tracing the growth and transition of this story of the lamb-plant from a truthful rumour of a curious fact into a detailed history of an absurd fiction,

March 5-.I have no doubt whatever that it originated in early descriptions of the cotton plant, and the introduction of cotton from India into Western Asia and the adjoining parts of Eastern Europe.' All this seems so simple as explained by Mr. Lee, how the early travellers came back and said, 'In the far East there is a tree on which grows the most beautiful fine wool, and the natives weave their garments of it.' The Western mind could conceive of no wool except that of a lamb; in this way the fiction grew, and was passed on from one writer to another. In a poem by Erasmus Darwin, published in 1781, of which more hereafter, it is alluded to as a plant that grew on the steppes of the Volga in the following terms:E'en round the Pole the flames of love aspire, And icy bosoms feel the sacred fire. Cradled in snow and fanned by Arctic air, Shines, gentle Borametz, thy golden hair; Rooted in earth, each cloven foot descends, And round and round her flexile neck she bends, Crops the grey coral moss and hoary thyme, Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime; Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam, And seems to bleat-a 'vegetable lamb.' Curiously enough, when in Norway last year, I came across an old wooden chair, and the back was carved in a way that seems to me conclusively to represent this old tradition. The design is a lamb enclosed in a circular cocoon, surrounded by branches and leaves. This chair I have now.

In the 'Nineteenth Century' of January 1880, there appeared a very interesting article on Parkinson's 'Paradisi in Sole,' called 'Old-fashioned Gardening,' by Mrs. Kegan Paul. She describes the title-page, and says, 'The tree of knowledge, its fruit still unplucked by Adam, appears in the centre of the plate.' I thought we were told that Adam never did pick it, but received it from the hand of Eve ? But this is a trifling criticism on a useful and original article. Mrs. Paul makes a great many delightful quotations from Parkinson, and says that he is 'not content to deny that single flowers can be transformed into double"by the observation of the change of the Moone, the constellations or conjunctions of Planets or some other Starres or celestial bodies." Parkinson holds that such transformation could not be effected by the art of man.' In her condemnation of bedding-out and in her admiration of the old-fashioned English garden, read by the light of these sixteen years, Mrs. Paul's article is almost prophetic. The 'Paradisi in Sole ' is essentially a book describing a garden of 'pleasant flowers' and with many interesting details about their cultivation. There is no allusion to medical matter at all, though, as usual, the botanist was a doctor. The woodcuts are rather coarser and rougher than in the Dutch book before described, but they are fairly drawn and generally like N ature. In a little book by Mrs. Ewing, called 'Mary's Meadow,' the author speaks a good deal of this book of Parkinson's, and in a footnote she alludes to the fact that the title is an absurd play upon words, after the fashion of Parkinson's day. Paradise is originally an Eastern word, meaning a park or pleasure ground. Paradisi in sole Paradisus terrestris means Park-in-son's Earthly Paradise!