shrunk from the double ‘_r_’ of ‘turtur’ and ‘purpura’; and this process of _making unlike_, requiring a term to express it, will create, or indeed has created, the word ‘dissimilation’, which probably will in due time establish itself among us in far wider than its primary use. ‘Watershed’ has only recently begun to appear in books of geography; and yet how convenient it must be admitted to be; how much more so than ‘line of water parting’, which it has succeeded; meaning, as I need hardly tell you it does, not merely that which _sheds_ the waters, but that which _divides_ them (‘wasserscheide’); and being applied to that exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of that region separate off and divide, some to one side, and some to the other; as in the Rocky Mountains of North America there are streams rising within very few miles of one another, which flow severally east and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger rivers, fall at least severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It must be allowed, I think, that not merely geographical terminology, but geography itself, had a benefactor in him who first endowed it with so expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we should scarcely have been aware of without it. There is another word which I have just employed, ‘affluent’, in the sense of a stream which does not flow into the sea, but joins a larger stream, as for instance, the Isis is an ‘affluent’ of the Thames, the Moselle of the Rhine. It is itself an example in the same kind of that whereof I have been speaking, having been only recently constituted a substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its utility is obvious. ‘Confluents’ would perhaps be a fitter name, where the rivers, like the Missouri and the Mississippi, were of equal or nearly equal importance up to the time of their meeting{124}. {Sidenote: ‘_Selfishness_’, ‘_Suicide_’}