All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a nomade rather than a sedentary people.[305] We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the 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 approximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly characterized 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_, because he considers it a translation, or rather an adoption of the German "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_; but the spelling _water-sched_, proposed by Herschel, is objectionable, both because _sch_ is a combination of letters wholly unknown to modern English orthography and properly representing no sound recognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that _watershed_, in the sense of _division-of-the-waters_, has a legitimate English etymology. 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_.