The navigation in Western waters has its peculiar dangers, and among these none are more dreaded than the sawyers and snags of the Mississippi, and some of its tributaries. The former are trees washed away by the current, either during a high flood or after their roots have been completely undermined, and then so imbedded in the river-bottom as to impede navigation. As they constantly change their places, steamboats often come unawares upon them, and are sunk or at least seriously injured. Snags derive their name from the old English snag, defined by Halliwell as "a tooth standing alone," whilst its meaning on our Western waters is more like that in Gill's proverb: "A bird in the bag is worth two on the snag," quoted by J. R. Lowell. The sawyer has the advantage of moving to and fro with a sawing motion, as the current tries to dislodge it; the snag is too firmly imbedded to move. Snags and sawyers," says C. Lanman, "abound throughout the whole extent of the Mississippi; they are taken from the shore by a rushing tide and planted in the channel quite as rapidly as the snag-vessels can extricate them from their dangerous position." (Summer in the Wilderness, p. 124.) 66 A somewhat technical term, perhaps, is the hugging-frame, the arched truss-braces which span the length of the majority of American steamboats. (The Engineer.) To this class belongs, likewise, the spreaderstick of the person who drives horses on the towpath, which pull a canal-boat. "The captain had started on his downward trip, and had tied up his boat near Oldtown, when he was attacked with a spreaderstick (a piece of wood used as a swingle-tree on the tow-track), and was brutally murdered by Howard." (Cumberland Journal, February 10, 1871.) The name is evidently derived from the use to which the stick is put, in spreading and holding apart the traces or ropes by which the horses pull the boat. A like term is the Fish-Basket of Pennsylvania, which designates a structure for taking fish, and is figured in Eli Bowen's Sketchbook of Pennsylvania (II., p. 83). "Various species," says Professor S. S. Haldeman, in a Memoir of 1844, "are abundantly caught. . . in fish-baskets, made of lathwork, with diverging walls of stone." The fact that the plural of the word wharf differs in England and here, is characteristic of the manner in which words generally are treated by us and by our English cousin. Here we say wharves, although Bancroft writes, "Commerce pushes its wharfs into the sea," while in England wharfs is considered alone admissible, although there also we find "Out upon the wharves they came, Tennyson. The English are, however, following our example very largely, and ere long, no doubt, both nations will use wharves alike. ON THE RAIL. RAILROADS, as they are now uniformly called in America by the public, although some companies owning large leading lines prefer the English name of Railways, have contributed, on the whole, fewer words and expressions to American-English than might be expected, from the enormous extent of their widespread network, the number of persons to whom they give employment, and the ingenuity which they stimulate. The fact is partly accounted for by the perfect identity of the systems prevailing in England and on this continent, and their almost simultaneous introduction in both countries. Besides, so many of our railroads are built by British capital, and therefore, in part at least, under foreign control, that the terminology has not yet become quite independent of that of the Old World. And yet the very elements of nomenclature, so to say, are different: railways abroad are railroads here, stations there are depots here, and English carriages and coaches have become American cars. The preference for Road lay probably in the greater familiarity with the term generally; highways were rarely known to the people here, as they are in England, and everything was called a road, from the National Road crossing the Alleghanies on its way West to the roadside inns, along the corduroy-roads of the South. Why we should ever have exchanged the sensible station of the English for the absurd depot of the French, is perfectly unaccountable; all the talk about the old friendship for France, dating from the days of Lafayette and Rochambeau, will, we fear, not explain the absurdity. And if we but gave it either its French sound, which . is not hard to acquire, or anglicized it at once, like men! But no, we must needs call it dee-po, and thus add to the absurdity. Justly, therefore, does R. G. White, in his clever book on Words and Their |