Photograph by Mark Daniels. 



THE GROVE OF CYPRESS TREES FIRST SEEN ALONG THE FAMOUS DRIVE 



The Seventeen-Mile Drive is a road, the smoothness of which makes a drive over it seem but a continuation of the ride in the luxurious Southern 

 Pacific coach which brings the tourist to this land of enchantment. It is indeed a blessing that the steel rails stop before they penetrate this 

 forest of cypress. 



The Tree of Legend and Romance 



By Mark Daniels 



Former Si(pcrinicndciit of National Parks 



THERE is a lone tree in Lonibardy that accomplished 

 what a million men suffered and slaved to do. It 

 stood in the path of the great Simplon road, and 

 at the sight of its stately grace Napoleon turned the road 

 from a straight line, that its beauty might remain man's 

 heritage. It is the cypress of Somma, and stands as a 

 monument to the greatness of one man and a lesson to 

 those who would sacrifice beauty to the god of gain. 

 That Napoleons are scarce we know, but are there so few 

 who have not even enough of his vision to see and appre- 

 ciate the glory of a magnificent forest or the eternal 

 miracle of a waterfall that they w-ill continue to squander 

 these birthrights by indiscriminately hewing down the 

 forests and damming up the streams ? 



Perhaps this cvpress of Somma, if it has not been shot 

 down by another of man's engines of destruction, still 

 stands as the first example of the spirit of conservation. 

 And saved for its beauty alone '. Think of it ! I hear 



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the groans of anguish as some millionaire lumberman of 

 Minnesota estimates the amount of board feet of precious 

 lumber that is contained in its 120 feet of towering trunk. 

 Napoleon might have built a nearby bridge with it, there- 

 by saving the cost of hauling; or he might have built a 

 fire in which to heat iron for axes witTi which to chop 

 down more trees ! But he did not, and that fact will 

 redound ever to his credit and to the shame of those who 

 are so ruthlessly stripping our land of its forest cover. 



There stands not one cypress, but a grove of them, of 

 surpassing beauty, on our western coast. True, they are 

 not of that tall, stately variety, with formal, architectural 

 lines ; they are, on the contrary, the exact or complete 

 reverse, for they are gnarled and twisted ; but they are 

 beautiful in their setting as anything that the eyes of man 

 may rest upon. There is but a comparatively small area 

 where they still grow, and they are as distinct among the 

 other conifers of their region as are the Sequoia Gigantea 



