CUTTACK (47), capital of a district in S. of Bengal, at the apex of the delta formed by the Mahanuddy; noted for its gold and silver filigree work.

CUVIER, GEORGES, a celebrated naturalist, born at Montebeliard, of Huguenot ancestry; the creator of comparative anatomy and palaeontology; was educated at Stuttgart, where he studied natural science; but the observation of marine animals on the coast of Normandy, where he held a tutorship, first led him to the systematic study of anatomy, and brought him into correspondence with Geoffroy St. Hilaire and others, who invited him to Paris, where he prosecuted his investigations, matured his views, and became professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes, a member of the French Institute, and Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and eventually a peer of France; his labours in the science to which he devoted his life were immense, but he continued to the last a determined opponent of the theory, then being broached and now in vogue, of a common descent (1769-1832).

CUXHAVEN, a German watering-place at the mouth of the Elbe, on the southern bank.

CUYP, ALBERT, a celebrated Dutch landscape-painter, son of Jacob Cuyp, commonly called Old Cuyp, also a landscapist, born at Dort; painted scenes from the banks of the Meuse and the Rhine; is now reckoned a rival of Claude, though he was not so in his lifetime, his pictures selling now for a high price; he has been praised for his sunlights, but these, along with Claude’s, have been pronounced depreciatively by Ruskin as “colourless” (1605-1691).

CUZCO (20), a town in Peru, about 11,440 ft. above the sea-level, the ancient capital of the Incas; still retains traces of its former extent and greatness, the inhabitants reckoned as then numbering 200,000, and the civilisation advanced.

CYBELE, a nature-goddess worshipped in Phrygia and W. Asia, whose worship, like that of the nature divinities generally, was accompanied with noisy, more or less licentious, revelry; identified by the Greeks with RHEA (q. v.), their nature-goddess.

CYCLADES, islands belonging to Greece, on the East or the AEgean Sea, so called as forming a circle round Delos, the most famous of the group.

CYCLIC POETS, poets who after Homer’s death caught the contagion of his great poem and wrote continuations, additions, &c.

CYCLOPEAN WALLS, a name given to structures found in Greece, Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily, built of large masses of unhewn stone and without cement, such as it is presumed a race of gigantic strength like the Cyclops (3) must have reared.

CYCLOPS, a name given to three distinct classes of mythological beings:  (1) a set of one-eyed savage giants infesting the coasts of Sicily and preying upon human flesh; (2) a set of Titans, also one-eyed, belonging to the race of the gods, three in number, viz., Brontes, Steropes, and Arges—­three great elemental powers of nature, subjected by and subject to Zeus; and (3) a people of Thrace, famed for their skill in building.