the possibility of contradiction, if also without possibility of proof, that he had influenced the mind of Castlereagh. Yet the fact remains that when Canning came into office in September 1822, he found the instructions to be given to the representative of the British government at the congress of Verona already drawn up by his predecessor, who had meant to attend the congress himself (see Londonderry, Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of). These instructions were handed on without change by Canning to the duke of Wellington, who went as representative, and they contain all the principles which have been said to have been peculiarly Canning’s. Indeed this policy was dictated by the character and position of the British government, and had been followed in the main since the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. Canning was its orator and minister rather than its originator. Yet his eloquence has associated with his name the responsibility for British policy at the time. No speech of his is perhaps more famous than that in which he claimed the initiative in recognizing the independence of the revolted Spanish colonies in South America in 1823—“I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old” (December 12, 1826).
When Lord Liverpool was struck down in a fit on the 17th of February 1827, Canning was marked out by position as his only possible successor. He was not indeed accepted by all the party which had followed Liverpool. The duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and several other members of the ministry, moved perhaps by personal animosity, and certainly by dislike of his known and consistent advocacy of the claims of the Roman Catholics, refused to serve with him. Canning succeeded in constructing a ministry in April—but the hopes and the fears of friends and enemies proved to be equally unfounded. His health had already begun to give way, and broke down altogether under the strain of the effort required to form his ministry. He had caught cold in January at the funeral of the duke of York, and never recovered. He died on the 8th of August 1827, at Chiswick, in the house of the duke of Devonshire, where Fox had died, and in the same room.
See Speeches, with a memoir by R. Therry (London, 1826); A. G. Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, 1822–1827 (2nd ed., London, 1831); Canning and His Times (London, 1859); Lord Dalling and Bulwer, Historical Characters (London, 1868); F. H. Hill, George Canning (London, 1887); Some Political Correspondence of George Canning, ed. E. J. Stapleton (2 vols., 1897); J. A. R. Marriott, George Canning and His Times, a Political Study (London, 1903); W. Alison Phillips, George Canning (London, 1903), with reproductions of contemporary portraits and caricatures; H. W. V. Temperley, George Canning (London, 1905).
CANNIZZARO, STANISLAO (1826–1910), Italian chemist, was born at Palermo on the 13th of July 1826. In 1841 he entered the university of his native place with the intention of making medicine his profession, but he soon turned to the study of chemistry, and in 1845 and 1846 acted as assistant to Rafaelle Piria (1815–1865), known for his work on salicin, who was then professor of chemistry at Pisa and subsequently occupied the same position at Turin. During the Sicilian revolution he served as an artillery officer at Messina and was also chosen deputy for Francavilla in the Sicilian parliament; and after the fall of Messina in September 1848 he was stationed at Taormina. On the collapse of the insurgents he escaped to Marseilles, in May 1849, and after visiting various French towns reached Paris in October. There he gained an introduction to M. E. Chevreul’s laboratory, and in conjunction with F. S. Cloëz (1817–1883) made his first contribution to chemical research in 1851, when they prepared cyanamide by the action of ammonia on cyanogen chloride in ethereal solution. In the same year he was appointed professor of physical chemistry at the National College of Alexandria, where he discovered that aromatic aldehydes are decomposed by alcoholic potash into a mixture of the corresponding acid and alcohol, e.g. benzaldehyde into benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol (“Cannizzaro’s reaction”). In the autumn of 1855 he became professor of chemistry at Geneva university, and six years later, after declining professorships at Pisa and Naples, accepted the chair of inorganic and organic chemistry at Palermo. There he spent ten years, studying the aromatic compounds and continuing to work on the amines, until in 1871 he was appointed to the chair of chemistry at Rome university. Apart from his work on organic chemistry, which includes also an investigation of santonin, he rendered great service to the philosophy of chemistry when in his memoir Sunto di un corso di Filosofia chemica (1858) he insisted on the distinction, till then imperfectly realized, between molecular and atomic weights, and showed how the atomic weights of elements contained in volatile compounds can be deduced from the molecular weights of those compounds, and how the atomic weights of elements of whose compounds the vapour densities are unknown can be ascertained from a knowledge of their specific heats. For this achievement, of fundamental importance for the atomic theory in chemistry, he was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society in 1891. Cannizzaro’s scientific eminence in 1871 secured him admission to the Italian senate, of which he was vice-president, and as a member of the Council of Public Instruction and in other ways he rendered important services to the cause of scientific education in Italy.
CANNOCK, a market town in the western parliamentary division of Staffordshire, England, in the district known as Cannock Chase, 130 m. N.W. from London by the London and North Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1891) 20,613; (1901) 23,974. The church of St Luke is Perpendicular, enlarged in modern times. The famous political preacher, Henry Sacheverell, held the living early in the 18th century. Cannock has tool, boiler, brick and tile works. Cannock Chase, a tract generally exceeding 500 ft. in elevation, extends on an axis from north-west to south-east over some 36,000 acres. It was a royal preserve, and remains for the most part an uncultivated waste, but it is also a rich coalfield, and there are mines in every direction. Brownhills, Burntwood and Chase Town, Great Wyrley, Hednesford, Hammerwich, and Pelsall are townships or villages of the mining population.
CANNON (a word common to Romance languages, from the Lat. canna, a reed, tube, with the addition of the augmentative termination -on, -one), a gun or piece of ordnance. The word, first found about 1400 (there is an indenture of Henry IV. 1407 referring to “canones, seu instrumenta Anglicè gunnes vocata”), is commonly applied to any form of firearm which is fired from a carriage or fixed mounting, in contradistinction to “small-arms,” which are fired without a rest or support of any kind.[1]
An exception must be made, however, in the case of machine guns (q.v.), and the word as used in modern times may be defined as follows: “a piece of ordnance mounted upon a fixed or movable carriage and firing a projectile of greater calibre than 112 in.” In French, however, canon is the term applied to the barrel of small arms, and also, as an alternative to mitrailleuse or mitrailleur, to machine guns, as well as to ordnance properly so-called. The Hotchkiss machine gun used in several navies is officially called “revolving cannon.” For details see Artillery, Ordnance, Machine Guns, &c. Amongst the many derived senses of the word may be mentioned “cannon curls,” in which the hair is arranged in horizontal tubular curls one above the other. For “cannon” in billiards see Billiards.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the “cannon” in England was distinctively a large piece, smaller natures of ordnance being called by various special names such as culverin, saker, falcon, demi-cannon, &c. We hear of Cromwell taking with him to Ireland (1649) “two cannon of eight inches, two cannon of seven, two demi-cannon, two twenty-four pounders,” &c.
Sir James Turner, a distinguished professional soldier contemporary with Cromwell, says: “The cannon or battering ordnance is divided by the English into Cannon Royal, Whole Cannon and Demi-Cannon. The first is likewise called the Double Cannon, she weighs 8000 pound of metal and shoots a bullet of 60, 62 or 63 pound weight. The Whole Cannon weighs 7000 pound of metal and shoots a bullet of 38, 39 or 40 pound.
- ↑ The original small arms, however, are often referred to as hand cannon.
