AIR-BREATHING SNAILS AND SLUGS 279 



visits it carries away a picture of mingled wildness, 

 sublimity, and beauty. 



It is well named; for here, within the compass of 

 a few score acres, is the diminishing home of the 

 cypress trees of California. From this little spot 

 came the seeds which have developed into hundreds 

 of miles of verdant hedges, and tens of thousands of 

 beautiful trees. 



The parent trees are venerable specimens, blown 

 by the strong sea-breezes into the most fantastic 

 forms. Here is one on the very edge of the bluff; 

 its trunk is horizontal, and its thick leaved top slants 

 up from the ground like the moss-covered roof of an 

 ancient farmhouse. Here stands another, grim and 

 solitary, with a gnarled and twisted trunk, uphold- 

 ing a close reefed sail of bright green foliage. And 

 there is a little group of them, kneeling together to- 

 wards the east, like pious pilgrims; yet showing by 

 their defiant limbs, which are bent and knotted like 

 the arms of wrestling giants, that though the proud 

 west wind has brought them to their knees, still their 

 spirit is not broken, and that they continually throw 

 back his challenge, and that they will never yield 

 their ground till the last green leaf has withered on 

 their scant and flattened tops. 



In the midst of all this mingling of the beautiful 

 and the picturesque is the home of a very humble 

 but very interesting mollusk, named Epiphragmo- 

 phora dupetithouarsi^ Desh., the Cypress Snail, 

 shown in Figure 270. During the summer months 

 I have sought them under the old cypresses, and 

 have found them quietly sleeping under old logs, 



