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lamb, and this he has done justly although the 2 notions, in the 

 historical development of the legend, end by becoming partly united. 



Chavannes while correctly connecting the origin of the material 

 referred to, with the filament of the "pinna, only relies on the authority 

 of an Arab author of the tenth century, Istakhri, according to whom 

 he reconstructs the legend which may have given birth to the Chinese 

 idea of the shui-yang or sea-sheep. In fact, according to Mr. Laufer, 

 the Arab traditions as well as those of the Chinese are reducible to a 

 Hellenic tradition. 



The first Greek author to mention materials made of the fibres of 

 the pinna is the sophist Alciphron who, in his letters, calls them 

 "woollen stuff out of the sea" Ta sx irtq Oxlouravic ''Iota As the 

 sheep is the principal animal to furnish wool one is thus lead, so to 

 say, to the idea of a sea-sheep. Tertullian, in his treaty "De Pallio," 

 written after 208, explains why he wears a pallium instead of a toga 

 and he there takes the opportunity of alluding to the fleece recovered 

 from the ocean where are to be found certain shells of rather large size 

 and furnished with mossy hair. ' Basile the Great (4th century), in 

 one of his homilies, expresses wonder at the golden fleece of the pinna 

 which no dye is able to imitate. 



The Arabian authors also speak of this sea wool which is so 

 beautiful that a robe made of it is worth more than a thousand gold 

 pieces. The arabian idea undergoes a curious development : the tissue 

 which, at first, was thought to be a product of an aquatic animal 

 becomes finally that of the plumage of a bird. This transformation, 

 so Mr. Laufer says, may be explained by linguistic and commercial 

 reasons. Pinna in Latin meant also "feather" (the form penna is later) 

 and this ambiguity may have lead the Arabs to understand the fibres 

 of the pinna as being the plumage of a bird. The Chinese texts bear 

 witness to the existence in the Far East of such materials woven of 

 feather; the Arab word suf (wool or down) even passed during the 

 Mongol period into the Chinese language under the form of su-fu or 

 so-fu (Watters, Essays p. 355). According to Bretschneider (Mediae- 

 val Eesearches, pp. 258, 291, 308) so-fu (wool or down) was sent to 

 China from Samarkand in 1392, from Ispahan in 1483 and from Lu-mi 

 (Rum, Byzantium) in 1548 and 1554. The Chinese works which 

 mention these materials are rather numerous. They have also picked 

 up another tradition which, upon close examination, seems to be a 

 development of the history of the shui-yang, namely that of lambs born 

 of the womb of the earth and connected with the ground by the 

 umbilical cord. The annals of the Tang (618-906) mention that they 

 are to be found at Fu-lin (Syria, possibly including Byzantium) and an 

 earlier text, cited by Chavannes, determines their habitat as being the 

 country of Ta Ts'in (that is the Roman or Hellenic near East), the 



