Vehiculum, a means of transportation, is applied to wagons or carts: omnes di, qui vehiculis _tensarum_ solemnes coitus ludorum initis, Verr. 5, 186; but also to ships: ut procul divinum et novum vehiculum _Argonautarum_ e monte conspexit, N. II, 89. * * * * * That the words which we have treated vary in meaning according to the context seems perfectly obvious; but the extent to which this is true in general has received little if any attention from linguistic students. The tracing of the meaning of a word through various periods of the language has been commonly enough done; that side of the question, however, this investigation has not touched except incidentally. But the material presented in this chapter and the preceding has, it is hoped, been sufficient to illustrate how the words formed with our suffixes, while revealing a limited tendency in meaning due to their verb stems, often also owe much of their meaning to the context in which they are used. CHAPTER IV OVERLAPPING OF SUFFIXES However great a tendency the suffixes under investigation have toward giving to the nouns a certain meaning, the variations of which they are capable,--due, as has been shown, to stem and context,--strongly suggest that there can be nothing very stable in the suffix itself. If there really were a fundamental meaning in the suffixes, there would be no such variation as we find. But a consideration which points even more to the comparatively fluid condition of these suffixes is the fact that we find other words, formed on the same stem, but with a different suffix, meaning precisely the same as the nouns made with these suffixes. Here again, the meanings are derived from an examination of the context. Sometimes the contexts are exactly parallel, at other times there is a sufficiently large element common to both to warrant us in saying that the nouns do not, at least in these particular instances, differ in meaning. The fact that some of these parallel words occur at different periods in the language does not weaken the argument, as the mere occurrence of them shows the unstable influence of the suffix; and, moreover, we need not suppose because one word is not found at a certain period while another on the same stem with a different suffix is found, that the first word was not in existence. It is just as reasonable to assume that the preservation of one word and not the other is due merely to common usage or the personal preference of the author. Metrical considerations might exclude the use of a certain word in poetry, but the instances are very rare, and will be noted in the proper place.