estern group
are the largest of the island.

The pleasures, then, of the Lafayette National Park cover a wide range
of human desire. Sea bathing, boating, yachting, salt-water and
fresh-water fishing, tramping, exploring the wilderness, hunting the
view spots--these are the summer occupations of many visitors, the
diversions of many others. The more thoughtful will find its historical
associations fascinating, its geological record one of the richest in
the continent, its forests well equipped schools for tree study, their
branches a museum of bird life.

To climb these low mountains, wandering by the hour in their hollows and
upon their sea-horizoned shoulders, is, for one interested in nature, to
get very close indeed to the secrets of her wonderful east. One may
stand upon Cadillac's rounded summit and let imagination realize for him
the day when this was a glaciered peak in a mighty range which forged
southward from the far north, shoulder upon shoulder, peak upon peak,
pushing ever higher as it approached the sea, and extending far beyond
the present ocean horizon; for these mountains of Mount Desert are by no
means the terminal of the original mighty range; the slow subsidence of
the coast has wholly submerged several, perhaps many, that once rose
south of them. The valley which now carries the St. Croix River drained
this once towering range's eastern slopes; the valley of the Penobscot
drained its western slopes.

The rocks beneath his feet disclose not only this vision of the geologic
past; besides that, in their slow decay, in the chiselling of the
trickling waters, in the cleavage of masses by winter's ice, in the
peeling of the surface by alternate freezing and melting, in the
dissolution and disintegration everywhere by the chemicals imprisoned in
air and water, all of which he sees beneath his feet, they disclose to
him the processes by which Nature has wrought this splendid ruin. And
if, captivated by this vision, he studies intimately the page of history
written in these rocks, he will find it full of fascinating detail.

The region also offers an absorbing introduction to the study of our
eastern flora. The exposed bogs and headlands support several hundred
species of plants typical of the arctic, sub-arctic, and Hudsonian
zones, together with practically all of the common plants of the
Canadian zone, and many of the southern coasts. So with the trees.
Essentially coastal, it is the land of conifers