3. Those which describe a river by the nature of its course, as winding, crooked, or otherwise.
4. Those which refer to the quality of its waters, as clear, bright, turbid, or otherwise.
5. Those which refer to the sound made by its waters.
6. Those which refer to the nature of its source, or the manner of its formation, as by the confluence of two or more streams.
7. Those which refer to it as a boundary or as a protection.
Under one or other of the above heads may be classed the greater part of the river-names of Europe.
And how dry and unimaginative a list it is! We dive deep into the ancient language of Hindostan for the meaning of words, but we recall none of the religious veneration to the personified river which is so strikingly manifest even to the present day. As we read in the Vedas of three thousand years ago of the way-farers supplicating the spirit of the stream for a safe passage, so we read in the newspapers of to-day of the pilgrims, as the train rattled over the iron bridge, casting their propitiatory offerings into the river below. We seek for word-meanings in the classical tongue of Greece, but they come up tinged with no colour of its graceful myths. Few and far between are the cases—and even these are doubtful, to say the least—in which anything of fancy, of poetry, or of mythology, is to be traced in the river-names of Europe.