The mistletoe (or mistil-tan, the pale branch, in Anglo-Saxon) is a pale-coloured, small-flowered member of a great family of parasitic plants, the Loranthaceæ. They all live upon trees, and draw a part of their nourishment from the juices of the tree into which their rootlets penetrate. The tropical allies of the mistletoe are very beautiful plants, with fine bunches of brilliantly-coloured flowers and broad handsome green leaves. Our mistletoe is most commonly found parasitic on apple trees and poplar trees. It occurs on nearly all our trees, but is very rare on the oak. A careful inquiry some time ago resulted in the discovery of only seven oaks in all England on which mistletoe was growing. The Druids took their sacred mistletoe from the sacred oak tree on account of its rarity. To them it was a charm against infertility and sterility, and, according to Pliny, was cut and distributed at the new year with great ceremony and the sacrifice of heifers. Its paired white berries contain a viscid fluid which gives it its botanical name Viscum album--and causes the seeds to adhere to the beaks of birds--and thus to be transported to a distance and introduced by the birds’ attempts to wipe their beaks into the cracks of the bark of trees, in which the seeds germinate. The white-berried mistletoe is the only English kind, and red mistletoe seems altogether out of character. But a red-berried species (Viscum cruciatum) is parasitic on the olive tree in Spain, North Africa, and Syria. Curiously enough, though the white-berried mistletoe is excommunicated by the Western Christian Church on account of its use in pagan worship, the red-berried mistletoe was gathered from olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the enclosure of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem by Sir Joseph Hooker, the great botanist. The red-berried mistletoe was successfully raised from seed on young olive trees six years ago in this country by the Hon. Charles Ellis, of Frensham, near Haslemere, and was figured at that time by Hooker.