Hence their predilection for oak groves and their requirement of oak leaves for all religious rites.

Pliny here remarks on the consonance of this practice with the etymology of the name Druid as interpreted even through Greek (the Greek for an oak being _drus_).

Were not this respect for the oak and for the mistletoe paralleled by numerous examples of tree and plant-worship given by Dr.Frazer and others, it might well have been suspected that Pliny was here quoting some writer who had tried to argue from the etymology of the name Druid.

Another suspicious circumstance in Pliny's account is his reference to the serpent's egg composed of snakes rolled together into a ball.

He states that he himself had seen such an 'egg,' of about the size of an apple.
Pliny, too, states that Tiberius Caesar abolished by a decree of the Senate the Druids and the kind of seers and physicians the Gauls then had.