NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MISTLETOE, 
309 
years old, not one has Mistletoe upon them. Even the Rev. W. Davies, in his 
Flora of Anglesea , once the head quarters of Druidism, is unable to mention a 
single locality where the Mistletoe now grows there.* A few years ago I had 
a long ramble in Surrey after the Mistletoe of the Oak. Being in London, an 
enthusiastic friend came to me one day and said, exultingly, that he had just 
heard that the Mistletoe had been seen on an Oak at Bookham Common, and that 
in the woods of Surrey it was not uncommon. The next morning off we started 
over bush, brake, and scaur ; and deluged with rain, after many efforts, drew only 
a blank day: and we learned afterwards, to our great mortification, that my 
friend’s informant had meant Ivy, when he said Mistletoe ! At last, however, on 
June the 7th, 1837, I was fortunate enough to behold a young Oak, about 70 or 
80 years old, with four fine bushes of Mistletoe growing upon it, in Earl Somers’s 
Park, at Eastnor, near Ledbury, on the side of an old British road, at the Western 
base of the Malvern hills, called the “ Ridgwaybut on the strictest inquiry 
and examination, among natural Oak woods there of more than 300 acres in 
extent, this was the only Oak with Mistletoe upon it, and is the only one I have 
ever seen. 
The Mistletoe is rather a local plant, though often occurring, where it does grow, 
in'immense quantities, as in the orchards of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and 
Gloucestershire. It is rare in Wales, being quite unknown in some districts, 
becomes still rarer in the North, and is only found in one spot in Scotland. On 
the Continent it is as uncommon upon the Oak as with us; and De Candolle, 
from having never seen it there, was induced to think that Loranthus Luropceus 
was the real Druidical plant, which is an untenable opinion— Loranthus , though 
common on the Continent, having never been seen wild in Britain in the 
present day. 
No author that I have met with gives any satisfactory solution as to how the 
term Mistletoe has arisen, though German and Danish have been brought forward 
for the purpose.! But I think I can give the etymology without going so far. 
Now there is an obsolete old English word called mistion , which is employed 
even in the writings of Boyle ; and this is defined in Dr. Johnson’s original folio 
edit, of his Dictionary as “ the state of being mingled’’ Now this is truly the 
state of our plant, which is intermingled with the foliage of various trees, and 
mixes up their juices with its own; and is now indeed in rural places still simply 
* The Island of Anglesea is taken to be one of their [the Druids] chiefest seats in Britain, be¬ 
cause it was a solitary island full of wood, and not inhabited of any but themselves ; and then the 
Isle of Mone , which is called Anglesea, was called yr Inys Dowyll, that is the Dark Island. And 
after that the Drudion were supprest, the huge groves which they favoured and kept a-foot, were 
rooted up, and that ground tilled.—T oland, Hist. Druids , 222. 
t See Withering’s Bott. Arr. in loc., and Loudon’s elaborate Arboretum Britannicum. 
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