208 On the Campus 



the Monterey cypress, its whole history, has been bound 

 up with the history of every part of the world, nay 

 probably of the solar system entire. The changing scenes 

 of geologic ages pass before us, and the very latest field 

 of effort and inquiry, the pleistocene, with its record of 

 alternating climate, even our latest knowledge, touches 

 also Monterey. 



3. How very small is still the scope of human knowl- 

 edge ! We find here and there a fact, here and there a 

 bed of leaves. Upon these we build, and by imagina- 

 tion lightly span vast stretches of the unknown. The 

 cypress was once in Greenland, it is now in California. 

 But where lay the causes of the change in climate, the 

 motive of this migration, or what were the incidents of 

 the journey, no single ascertained fact may yet cer- 

 tainly declare. 



Here then we are able to trace the probable history 

 of at least one type of existing conifer and learn the 

 later chapters in its history not the earlier who 

 knows what these may have been or how the cypress 

 reached the arctic pole? Yet from what we now behold 

 we are sure those earlier chapters once were plain. Only 

 of this we may be sure : were the whole record once before 

 us, we should find our cypress a stranger even at the 

 pole, a passing transient whose ancestors had, in the ages 

 gone before, carboniferous devonian, obedient to con- 

 tinual summons, journeyed up and down the shaping 

 continents of the world, responsive to all the perturba- 

 tions that have moulded the planet itself, persistent, per- 

 petual, relentless as the lapse of years. 





