(M65) Thus the Ainos agree with the Druids in regarding mistletoe as a cure for almost every disease, and they agree with the ancient Italians that applied to women it helps them to bear children. A similar belief as to the fertilizing influence of mistletoe, or of similar plants, upon women is entertained by the natives of Mabuiag, an island in Torres Straits. These savages imagine that twins can be produced “by the pregnant woman touching or breaking a branch of a loranthaceous plant (_Viscum sp._, probably _V. orientale_) parasitic on a tree, _mader_. The wood of this tree is much esteemed for making digging sticks and as firewood, no twin-producing properties are inherent in it, nor is it regarded as being infected with the properties of its twin-producing parasite.”(253) Again, the Druidical notion that the mistletoe was an “all-healer” or panacea may be compared with a notion entertained by the Walos of Senegambia. These people “have much veneration for a sort of mistletoe, which they call _tob_; they carry leaves of it on their persons when they go to war as a preservative against wounds, just as if the leaves were real talismans (_gris-gris_).” The French writer who records this practice adds: “Is it not very curious that the mistletoe should be in this part of Africa what it was in the superstitions of the Gauls? This prejudice, common to the two countries, may have the same origin; blacks and whites will doubtless have seen, each of them for themselves, something supernatural in a plant which grows and flourishes without having roots in the earth. May they not have believed, in fact, that it was a plant fallen from the sky, a gift of the divinity?”(254)