182 PLANT LIFE 
CHAPTER XVI 
FLOWERING PARASITES 
Ir has been already pointed out that the 
non-green saprophytes or parasites are by 
no means limited to the classes of Fungi and 
Bacteria. Quite a large number of the 
flowering plants have adopted the habit 
of utilising extraneous stores of organic 
food, and in connection therewith have more 
or less lost the faculty of producing chloro- 
phyll. There is the strongest possible 
evidence that the change has come about 
in correlation with the altered conditions of 
nutrition. In other words, the more or less 
complex food-substances present in the living 
or dead bodies of other organisms do influence 
the structure of those plants which make use 
of them, and one result is seen in the loss of 
the faculty of producing chlorophyll. 
One might, then, expect to find many links 
connecting the normal green plants with those 
highly specialised, or as they are often called, 
degraded, forms characteristic of extreme 
parasites. And as a matter of fact we can 
trace such a series in a number of instances. 
The Mistletoe (Viscum album) is a parasite 
which betrays very little of the degeneration 
