128 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
it must have been extremely difficult for them to get a sufficient ' 
supply of it from the venerated tree for all the ceremonies and 
incantations in which they employed it. Its great rarity on it now ; 
will he apparent when I say that all the instances of its growing . 
there that the writer of an extremely interesting and elaborate 
article on this curious parasite, in the Journal of Botany for ' 
December, 1864, could find recorded as existing in England, at the \ 
time he wrote, were seven only. To these, however, he has since | 
been enabled to add one other, from an oak with mistletoe on it ! 
having been discovered last year in a hedge-row of a field called ] 
**The Harps," at Haven, in the ancient forest of Deerfold; so j 
there are now altogether eight examples recorded by Dr. Bull, the \ 
author of the papers referred to. The other seven are stated to be j 
at the following places : | 
1. At Eastnor, near Malvern. 
2. At Tedstone, Delamere. 
3. At Badam's Court, Sedbury Park, near Chepstow. 
4. At Burningfold Earm, Dunsfold, Surrey. 
5. In Hackwook Park, near Basingstoke. 
6. ''The Plymouth Oak. On recent authority, that of Mr. | 
Edwin Lees, as quoted by Mr. T. AV. Gissing in the new series of \ 
the Phytologist (vol. i. p. 192), it grows in an oak-tree not far / 
from Plymouth, by the side of the South Devon Eailway." i 
7. The Erampton Seven Oak. (H. C. Cliff'ord.) 
I commenced this little paper on purpose to make some remarks 1 
on one of these alledged examples of mistletoe-fostering oaks ; I 
namely, ]S"o. 6, the tree that has the name of our good town 1 
attached to it — "the Plymouth Oak." The station is more pre- < 
cisely given in Eavenshaw's List of Devon Plants, published in , 
1860, than in Dr. Bull's paper; for there it appears as ''an oak . 
in a wood three miles from Plymouth, by the side of the South ] 
Devon Railway," on the authority of Mr. Gissing. Besides being -j 
mentioned in the three works already named { Journal of Botany, j 
Phytologist, and Eavenshaw's Devon Flora), this tree has been ; 
brought forward as a mistletoe-bearing one in the last number of 
the Quarterly Journal of Science. 
After this it seems, I must confess, rather an ungracious work | 
for me, a Plymouth botanist, to dispute the right of my own fair j 
town to the great honour, botanically, of having so remarkable a < 
natural curiosity linked with its name in the works just mentioned. 
I 
