The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

The barometz, a plant believed to grow lambs on stalks, traced through four centuries of learned credulity to the cotton plant that, Lee argues, started it — not the woolly fern root that others blamed. Lee wrote a series of these and this is the funniest. This edition binds 53 plates after painters including Bacciarelli, Van Gogh, Troyon and Kars, with seven illustrations restored and coloured.