77 
The Mistletoe (Viscum album, L.).— Forgotten or not, the mis- 
tleto is perhaps the most distinguished plant in the flora of England. 
Its name has been spelt in more ways than any other well-known 
word in our language. Mistleto itself has been a problem to ety- 
mologists, and there is the usual divergence of opinion on the sub- 
ject. Prior thinks it means the "mixed" shrub, from its appearance, 
so different from its parent stock. Forby thinks mislinbush means 
the "golden bush/' from a Saxon name of a kind of brass. Virgil 
speaks of it as the ramus aureus; a German poet has called it die 
goldfiirhte mistel^ and the Welsh have named it pren puraur or ''tree 
of pure gold/' But the Saxon name mentioned by Forby means 
nothing but *' mixed metal," so at best this etymology is only a step 
in the explanation. In reality it means the '' dung twig " or ** shrub." 
The final syllable '* -to " or " -den " corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon 
tfl^i a twig." Mistel is derived originally from a Sanskrit word 
meaning ** excrement." The name may possibly refer to the slimy 
mucilage surrounding the seeds, but more probably to the way \x\ 
which the plant is propagated. The missel thrush or missel bird is 
really the mistleto thrush, and it is so named because of its great 
fondness for the berries. Like the nutmeg-pigeon of the Spice 
Islands, which eats the nutmeg fruits, digests the pulp, and expels 
the seeds which we call nutmegs, sometimes carrying them many 
miles from the parent, the missel thrush, by, eating the berries, is the 
chief agent in preserving the species. 
Viseus or viscum is the Latin name for this plant; botanically it is 
distinguished as Viscum album. It is sometimes difficult to separate 
the meaning of visctis, the mistleto, from viseus, glue or birdlime, for 
making which the mistleto was formerly esteemed inferior only to 
the holly. And the word viscera, which is connected with them 
J^oth, points to the original meaning of all three. Vish is the Sans- 
•^nt root, meaning to '' separate " or '' disjoin,"* One of its numerous 
derivatives is vishta, " excrement," and thence comes viseum. With 
vtscum is connected a long series of words. The iks, iksos and iksia 
of the Greeks, called biskos in the Beotian, and fiskos in the Arcadian 
dialect, the Italian vischio and the Portuguese visgo are all related to 
«. The French is g7ii; in the Berry dialect this is gu^ in Norman vi 
or VI de pommier; in Aube^r^/or havi, and in Manche7£7. The Celts 
pr Gauls are said to have called the plant visca and \iscus. Gwysglys 
»s the Welsh representative of the same word. Gwysgeulyd and 
K^^ysgonlys, also Welsh, are probably connected with it. Guis, an old 
Erse name, means " mistleto " when a noun, and " viscous " when an 
adjective. In parts of Prussia the plant is called toispe, which may 
f^e connected with viscum, though it is more probably related to the 
^^espelt of West Gothland, which, according to Grimm, means ' holy 
wheat." This name is rather obscure. The dedication of the plant 
to Freya, or its worship by the Druids, may account for the epithet 
jo'yi but the connection of the plant with wheat is not easy to trace 
^ock, a German botanist of the i6th century, states that m tmies of 
scarcity poor folk have gathered, dried, and powdered the plant, and, 
mixing it with rye-flour, have m.ide a not unwholesome bread. 
Trollope tells us that the plant is called in Breton lou-zou-ar- 
