Contributions to the Morphology of the 
Mistletoe (Yiscum album, L.). 
BY 
SELMAR SGHONLAND, Ph.D. 
With Plate XVII. 
D URING the past few years I have repeatedly had 
opportunities of observing a large number of abnor- 
malities in the structure and arrangement of the organs of the 
mistletoe, many of which have been noticed before, while others 
are apparently new. They have led me to give interpretations 
to some morphological characters of this plant different from 
those hitherto given, and I therefore think they are worth 
describing. 
In the present paper I propose to deal chiefly with the 
morphology of the flowering shoots, including both the arrange- 
ment and the general structure of the flowers. In order 
to make my remarks more intelligible, I have included almost 
all that has been said on the subject by Wydler 1 and Eichler 2 . 
The mistletoe is dioecious 3 . The plants of the two sexes 
have on the whole the same structure. The axis of the seed- 
ling produces two cotyledons and a pair of foliage- leaves 
alternating with these. It then ceases to grow any further, 
but in the axils of the foliage-leaves buds are produced which 
develop into branches the next year. Each branch bears at 
its base two minute opposite scale-leaves, the prophylls of 
the new shoot (p, p in the diagrams) ; they are at right angles 
to the bract of the shoot (. B in the diagrams). Near the top of 
1 Flora, i860, p. 443. 
2 Bliithendiagramme, ii. p. 552. 
3 Only a single case in which a male plant had also produced some female 
flowers and fruits is mentioned by Masters in his Vegetable Teratology, p. 509. 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. II. No. VII, November 1888.] 
