CATTERMOLE, GEORGE, artist, born in Norfolk; illustrated Britton’s “English Cathedrals,” “Waverley Novels,” and the “Historical Annual” by his brother; painted mostly in water-colour; his subjects chiefly from English history (1800-1868).
CATTLE PLAGUE, or RINDERPEST, a disease which affects ruminants, but especially bovine cattle; indigenous to the East, Russia, Persia, India, and China, and imported into Britain only by contagion of some kind; the most serious outbreaks were in 1865 and 1872.
CATULLUS, CAIUS VALERIUS, the great Latin lyric poet, born at Verona, a man of wealth and good standing, being, it would seem, of the equestrian order; associated with the best wits in Rome; fell in love with Clodia, a patrician lady, who was the inspiration, both in peace and war, of many of his effusions, and whom he addresses as Lesbia; the death of a brother affected him deeply, and was the occasion of the production of one of the most pathetic elegies ever penned; in the civic strife of the time he sided with the senate, and opposed Caesar to the length of directing against him a coarse lampoon (84-54 B.C.).
CAUCA, a river in Colombia, S. America, which falls into the Magdalena after a northward course of 600 m.
CAUCASIA, a prov. of Russia, geographically divided into Cis-Caucasia on the European side, and Trans-Caucasia on the Asiatic side of the Caucasus, with an area about four times as large as England.
CAUCASIAN RACE, a name adopted by Blumenbach to denote the Indo-European race, from the fine type of a skull of one of the race found in Georgia.
CAUCASUS, an enormous mountain range, 750 m. in length, extending from the Black Sea ESE. to the Caspian, in two parallel chains, with tablelands between, bounded on the S. by the valley of the Kur, which separates it from the tableland of Armenia; snow-line higher than that of the Alps; has fewer and smaller glaciers; has no active volcanoes, though abundant evidence of volcanic action.
CAUCHON, bishop of Beauvais, infamous for the iniquitous part he played in the trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc; d. 1443.
CAUCHY, AUGUSTIN LOUIS, mathematician, born in Paris; wrote largely on physical subjects; his “Memoir” on the theory of the waves suggested the undulatory theory of light; professor of Astronomy at Paris; declined to take the oath of allegiance to Napoleon III., and retired (1789-1857).
CAUCUS, a preliminary private meeting to arrange and agree on some measure or course to propose at a general meeting of a political party.
CAUDINE FORKS, a narrow mountain gorge in Samnium, in which, during the second Samnite war, a Roman army was entrapped and caught by the Samnites, who obliged them to pass under the yoke in token of subjugation, 321 B.C.
CAUDLE, MRS., an imaginary dame, a conception of Douglas Jerrold, famous for her “Curtain Lectures” all through the night for 30 years to her husband Mr. Job Caudle.