MISTLETOES AND LORANTHUSES. 211 



dispersed by birds like the berries of the common Mistletoe, and the way in which the 

 parasite settles upon and clings to branches of the host-plant is the same as in that 

 species. It also develops sinkers and cortical roots, but these root-structures are 

 not by any means so regularly arranged as in Viscum albv/m, but form an inex- 

 tricable web of strands and filaments pervading the internal layers of cortex, and 

 resolving itself into finer and finer groups of cells, which end by looking not unlike 

 a mycelium, and also remind one of the suction-apparatus possessed by Rafflesiacese. 

 Such of these strands and cellular filaments as are imbedded in the wood of the 

 juniper do undoubtedly play the part of suction-organs. They are present in large 

 numbers, and some of them are occasionally encompassed by several annual rings. 

 They possess no special zone of growth. The elongation necessary to prevent their 

 being enveloped and overwhelmed by the wood, as it adds to its thickness, is effected 

 by the division of individual cells and groups of cells. The outgrowth of shoots 

 from the root is much more exuberant than in the common Mistletoe; but the 

 death of the original plant takes place much earlier, and close to yellowish-green 

 bushes of various degrees of smallness, one finds very regularly dead or dying 

 shrublets already turned brown, all growing promiscuously over the somewhat 

 swollen branches of the red-berried Juniper. 



The behaviour of Loranthus Europceus, which is parasitic on oaks and chestnuts 

 in the east and south of Europe, is altogether unique. The mode of its attack upon 

 the branches of oaks is, it is true, similar to that of the two other Loranthaceae just 

 described. The yellow berries, which are grouped in graceful biseriate racemes, are 

 eaten with avidity by thrushes in the autumn and winter, and the undigested seeds 

 are deposited with the dung of those birds upon the branches of trees. The embryo, 

 on emerging from the seed, bends towards the bark and sticks to it, at the bottom 

 of little rifts and crevices, for the most part, by means of the radicle, which becomes 

 an attachment-disc. A process now arises from the centre of the attachment-disc, 

 and pierces through all the cortical layers of the oak-branch as far as to the zone 

 of young wood, just as if it were a small nail driven in. This process increases 

 in thickness at the expense of the nutriment it withdraws from the young 

 wood, and from it are developed one, two, or three branches, which, however, 

 invariably run downwards beneath the bark, that is to say, in the direction opposed 

 to that of the stream of sap ascending in the oak-wood, and never produce the 

 sinkers so characteristic of the Mistletoe. Each of these roots is shaped like a 

 wedge, even from the rudimentary stage, and acts, too, in the manner of a wedge, 

 penetrating between the yet soft and delicate cells of the cambium, which were 

 formed in the spring at the periphery of the solid older wood of the previous year, 

 and were destined to constitute a new annual ring, splitting and tearing in the 

 process that cell-tissue. Such of these tender cells as lie outside the wedge die, those 

 situated within become lignified and altered into solid wood, to which the wedge- 

 shaped root firmly adheres. Beneath the apex of the wedge, the lignification of 

 cambium cells naturally extends much further towards the exterior, because there 

 it is not at all broken or dead. In front of the apex of the wedge, therefore, there 



