All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a nomade rather than a sedentary people.[305] We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters the earth. The establishment of an approximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly characterized distinctions of rural surface—woodland and plough land—would involve a certain persistence of character in all the branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance which human wisdom can neither prevent nor foresee, and would thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well-ordered and stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a people of progress.
Note on word watershed, omitted on p. 257.—Sir John F. W. Herschel (Physical Geography, 137, and elsewhere) spells this word water-sched, because he considers it a translation, or rather an adoption of the German "Wasser-scheide, separation of the waters, not water-shed, the slope down which the waters run," As a point of historical etymology, it is probable that the word in question was suggested to those who first used it by the German Wasserscheide; but the spelling water-sched, proposed by Herschel, is objectionable, both because sch is a combination of letters wholly unknown to modern English orthography and properly representing no sound recognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that watershed, in the sense of division-of-the-waters, has a legitimate English etymology.
The Anglo-Saxon sceadan meant both to separate or divide, and to shade or shelter. It is the root of the English verbs to shed and to shade, and in the former meaning is the A. S. equivalent of the German verb scheiden.
Shed in Old English had the meaning to separate or distinguish. It is so used in the Owl and the Nightingale, v. 197. Palsgrave (Lesclarcissement, etc., p. 717) defines I shede, I departe thinges asonder; and the word still means to divide in several English local dialects. Hence, watershed, the division or separation of the waters, is good English both in sense and spelling.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WATERS.
LAND ARTIFICIALLY WON FROM THE WATERS: a, EXCLUSION OF THE SEA BY DIKING; b, DRAINING OF LAKES AND MARSHES; c, GEOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCE OF SUCH OPERATIONS—LOWERING OF LAKES—MOUNTAIN LAKES—CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF DRAINING LAKES AND MARSHES—GEOGRAPHICAL AND CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS, RESERVOIRS, AND CANALS—SURFACE AND UNDERDRAINING, AND THEIR CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS—IRRIGATION AND ITS CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS.
INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS: a, RIVER EMBANKMENTS; b, FLOODS OF THE ARDÈCHE; c, CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS; d, INUNDATIONS OF 1856 IN FRANCE; e, REMEDIES AGAINST INUNDATIONS—CONSEQUENCES IF THE NILE HAD BEEN CONFINED BY LATERAL DIKES.