INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE. 
329 
proportions, and devise means for maintaining tlie 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 ap¬ 
proximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly charac¬ 
terized 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, be¬ 
cause he considers it a translation, or rather an adoption of the German 
a 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 ; hut the spelling water-sched , proposed by Herschel, 
is objectionable, both because sch is a combination of letters wholly un¬ 
known to modern English orthography and properly representing no sound 
recognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that water¬ 
shed, in the sense of division-of-the-waters, has a legitimate English ety¬ 
mology. 
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 {Les clarcisse- 
ment, 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. 
