

THE MISTLETOE. JS 



much infested with it. He also asks me whether 

 the sex of the mistletoe is likely to be determined 

 by the tree on which it grows.* It is, perhaps, a 

 fact worth mentioning, that the mistletoe has never 

 been known to grow in Ireland. 



* " The mistletoe grows on the oaks in the Peninsula of India" 

 See Murray's Demonstration of Evidence of Revelation, p. 241, 

 ed. 1840 The same friend, who has pointed out the above pas- 

 sage to my notice, also observes, that in the correspondence of the 

 late Sir James Smith (1, p. 460) is the following account of this 

 plant : "The oaks in the Arcadian mountains presented them with 

 the true ancient mistletoe (loranthus Europaeus,) while our mis- 

 seltoe (viscum album) grows only on the silver fir." See also 

 Tournefort's Tour in the Levant, vol. 3, p. 279. A dissertation 

 on the medicinal properties of the misseltoe was published in 1729, 

 by Sir John Albatch; and a treatise on Epilepsy, and the use 

 of the viscus quercinus, or mistletoe of the oak, in the cure of 

 that disease, by Henry Fraser, M.D. 1806. See also Plinii Nat. 

 Hist. Lib. xvi. 95. The mistletoe must grow on the oak in the 

 Morea, as it is called in Laconia i%ioSpvQ. This is the viscum 

 album. This plant grows on Parnassus, and is gathered by the 

 herdsmen as food for the labouring oxen : it is called by the 

 modern Greeks /^eXXa. See Walpole's Memoirs of European 

 Turkey, p. 281 ; and Falconer's tracts on Natural History, from 

 the Writers of Antiquity, 4to. 1793. The loranthus is called 

 ooc ; a name wrongly given by Linnaeus to the viscum. See 

 Falconer (Tab. Alt.) p. 189. 



