Finally, an eminent geographer and geologist, Professor H. D. Rogers, in his account of the parallel roads of Lochaber, [VALLErs, col. 544] states that each of them coincides "in level with some water shed, or notch in the hills leading out from its glen into some other glen ;" implying only by watershed an opening, by which water escapes to a lower level, and merely adopting one of the senses of the word shed.
We find, therefore, that at present the expression watershed is employed, by the first authorities, to denote any portion of inclined land on which water appears or descends from a higher to a lower level.
The spirit of Dr. Beke 'a remarks on the subject is applicable to other scientific terms which have been derived from the German language, and especially to those adopted from the phraseology of miners. Both geography and geology were cultivated as sciences in Germany before they had become such in England ; and mining in the former country was already a systematic art with a copious terminology. Some of the principal founders also of modern geology in England bad been students in the celebrated school of Freiberg under Werner, which became an additional cause for the introduction of German terms into scientific nomenclature. This, indeed, was inevitable, and might have been unexceptionable, but an erroneous procedure took place, of which we have an example in the term which is the subject of the present article. Barbarous imitations of German terms and phrases were made, instead of expressing their meaning in sound English words, or constructing compound terms derived from the perennial sources of the Greek or Latin languages. This was done even by men who were fully competent to take these preferable alternatives; thus, the late Rev. Dr. W. D. Conybeare, afterwards Dean of Llandafl; who was an ornament of the University of Oxford, and a geologist of great merit, substituted, about fifty years ago, the term strike, now universally employed by English geologists, for the German word strcich, to denote the direction of stratified rocks, at right angles to their line of dip, as referred to the cardinal points. An unreasonable horror of technicality and abstruseness appears to have prevailed among the gifted men to whom we have alluded, who, in their anxiety to avoid burdening the new sciences they were fostering with =familiar expressions, left them almost without an appropriate vocabulary, the want of which, especially in geology, has still to be supplied, in many instances, by awkward and sometimes tedious periphrasis.
It is worth the remark that the propriety of Dr. Beke's substitution seems to be tacitly admitted by other geographers ; for in the index to the 'Manual of Geographical Science,' published with the second volume, the passages above cited from Mr. Nicolay, explaining the applications of "watershed," are referred to by the words, "water parting, meaning of term;' although that term does not occur in them. This may be taken as an indication that it may not be too late to establish "water-parting" for the primary sense in which "water shed" has been received ; but we think that the latter may be accepted also, confined, however, to the secondary meanings to which, as we have seen, it has been extended, and more particularly to those involving the obvious meaning of the English words of which it consists.
The importance to the inhabitants of a country of the geographical configuration or phenomenon described by the term water-parting, and the influence which a particular example of it may exert in the produc tion of national ideas, is curiously illustrated by the Rev. A. P. Stanley's interpretation, adopted and extended by Dr. Beke, of the story told to the historian Herodotus, in Egypt, by the treasurer of Minerva's Treasury at Sais. This was, that there were two mountains, named Crophi and Mophi, rising into sharp peaks, situated between the city of Syene in Thebais, and Elephantine ; and that the sources of the Nile issued from between those mountains, half of the water flowing over Egypt and to the north, and the other half over Ethiopia and to the south. Herodotus observes that by the deep unfathomable sources described to him in this story were meant the violent eddies of the cataracts ; and Mr. Stanley argues, that to the ancient inhabitants of Lower Egypt, the sight or the report of such a convulsion as the rapids make " in the face of their calm and majestic river must have seemed the very commencement of its existence, the struggling into life of what afterwards becomes so mild and beneficent; and that if they heard of a river Nile further south, it was but natural for them to think it could not be their own river. The granite range of Syene formed their Alps—the water-parting of their world. if a stream existed on the opposite side, they imagined that it flowed in a contrary direction into the ocean of the south. (' Sources of the Nile,' p. 43 ; Stanley's ' Sinai and Palestine,' p. xliii.)