8 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



however, are often exceedingly graceful as well as beautiful. 

 No doubt their abundance and weed-like qualities in certain 

 situations have militated against any claims to beauty they may 

 possess. 



THE MONTEREY CYPRESS 



By Walter Albion Squires. 



A SPECIES of plant which is on the verge of extinction 

 •*■*■■ possesses a peculiar interest for the thoughtful 

 botanist. Such a plant is playing the last act of a tragedy 

 ages long. Perhaps it has been waging its losing fight for 

 life through a hundred centuries and now that it is about 

 to bid an everlasting farewell to earth, the effects of its 

 long struggle are written in root and stem and leaf. Even 

 the habitat of such a plant is often an eloquent witness to 

 its long and losing fight for "a place in the sun" ; for it has 

 usually been pushed down and out until you find it making 

 its last stand on the very edges of the world. If it be an 

 herbaceous plant it has become depauperate in form ; a mere sug- 

 gestion of what it was in the days of its prosperity. The little 

 Schimca hiding in the grass and drawing its scanty sustenance 

 from the soil of barren sand was in all probability at one 

 time a lordly plant among the denizens of the archean 

 swamps. The humble club mosses are lineal descendants 

 of the huge plants whose fallen trunks have made the coal 

 measures. 



On the storm-beaten cliffs of the California coast south 

 of the Bay of Monterey, a certain species of conifer known 

 to botanists as Cupressus macrocarpaa or Monterey cypress, is 



