The Sallad Earthen Vessel, and the Scythian Lamb
Description:
"Fig. 1" depicts an earthen jar or vase. "Fig. 2" depicts the root of a plant named the "Scythian Lamb".
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Location:
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table XV. The Sallad Earthen Vessel, and the Scythian Lamb. Figure 1 features a porous earthen vessel with furrows, which were intended to be covered with the seeds of salad herbs. When the vessel was filled with water the seeds sprouted. Figure 2 is described as a 'plant animal called by the Muscovite, Little Lamb.' It is actually the root of a fern-like plant. These figures are from two separate drawings” (Thornton 70).Theme
Classification. Museum. Natural history.
Significance
Although the two drawings on this plate clearly unite objects from different categories of the British Museum’s collections—the vessel in Figure 1 is man-made, an artificial production, while the lamb in Figure 2 appears to be a product of nature—the so-called “Scythian lamb” further confuses the classificatory boundaries that the associations between the artifacts in Rymsdyk’s drawings consistently challenge. As R. Dodsley explains in his 1762 guide to the British Museum, the lamb is, despite its mammalian features, not an animal but a plant:Its Root is covered by a sort of Down resembling Wool, and there are Shoots, or Fibres, which serve well enough to represent the Legs and Horns of the vegetable Animal. A very little Help of the Imagination makes it altogether a tolerable Lamb. Many strange Qualities have been given to this Production, and as strange Stories told of it, some having described it with a Skin like a real Lamb, but of much superior Value, others have said that Wolves delighted to feed on it, besides many more Fictions too tedious to take notice of here; insomuch that some were inclined to believe there was no such Thing in Nature. (149-50)Ephraim Chambers also takes note of “this vegetable monster” in his 1728 Cyclopaedia, mentioning that while many believe “that wolves are fond of it, while no other beasts will feed on it,” there are also those who “suspected the whole for a fable."
Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Delineator:
Image Date:
1791