The British-Indian species of Viscum revised and compared with those of South-Eastern Asia, Malaysia, and Australia

When revising the Visca of the Malay Archipelago and Indo-China, I met with some nomenclatorial difficulties, for which a more thorough study of the British-Indian Visca seemed necessary. The distinction of the species in HOOKER’S Flora soon appeared not to be depended upon. At the time of HOOKER’S revising the British-Indian Loranthaceae, only a scanty quantity of herbarium was available, and, the distinction between several species being extremely difficult, it is no wonder that HOOKER’S treatment of Viscum is no more up to date now. As appears from notes on herbarium sheets, GAMBLE later made a rather thorough study of the British-Indian Visca, which was only partly included in his Madras Flora, but he did not include the species of adjacent countries in his study. We now have a much larger quantity of herbarium materials at our disposal; several species described from outside British-India appeared to occur inside its frontiers, and new species had to be described from British India and China. Therefore a critical revision of all the Asiatic species seemed not to be superfluous. Moreover, the close relationship of the Australian Visca with Asiatic species made it desirable to include also the former in this revision. A revision of all the Asiatic, Malaysian, and Australian Visca would therefore have been the result, if not political circumstances had rendered it impossible to obtain the materials of several important Herbaria in the Tropics. I therefore preferred to close my study on the genus Viscum provisorily, and to publish it in the present form, in expectation of better times. The Herbaria upon which the present revision is based, mainly are those of Kew Gardens (K), and the Dehra Dun Forest Experiment Station (DD), the Viscum materials of which were kindly sent to me for examination. Many data, however, could be added from other Herbaria, such as those of Buitenzorg (B), Berlin-Dahlem (BD), the British Museum of Natural History (BM), Berkeley (UC), Brisbane (Bris), Edinburg (E), Geneva (G), Göteborg (Göt), Groningen (Gro), Honolulu (H), Leiden (L), Manila (M), Paris (P), Shillong (Sh), Singapore (S), and Vienna (V).