CSIKY, GREGOR (1842–1891), Hungarian dramatist, was born on the 8th of December 1842 at Pankota, in the county of Arad. He studied Roman Catholic theology at Pest and Vienna, and was professor in the Priests’ College at Temesvár from 1870 to 1878. In the latter year, however, he joined the Evangelical Church, and took up literature. Beginning with novels and works on ecclesiastical history, which met with some recognition, he ultimately devoted himself to writing for the stage. Here his success was immediate. In his Az ellenállhatatlan (“L’Irrésistible”), which obtained a prize from the Hungarian Academy, he showed the distinctive features of his talent—directness, freshness, realistic vigour, and highly individual style. In rapid succession he enriched Magyar literature with realistic genre-pictures, such as A Proletárok (“Proletariate”), Buborckok (“Bubbles”), Két szerelem (“Two Loves”), A szégyenlös (“The Bashful”), Athalia, &c., in all of which he seized on one or another feature or type of modern life, dramatizing it with unusual intensity, qualified by chaste and well-balanced diction. Of the latter, his classical studies may, no doubt, be taken as the inspiration, and his translation of Sophocles and Plautus will long rank with the most successful of Magyar translations of the ancient classics. Among the best known of his novels are Arnold, Az Atlasz család (“The Atlas Family”). He died at Budapest on the 19th of November 1891.
CSOKONAI, MIHALY VITEZ (1773–1805), Hungarian poet, was born at Debreczen in 1773. Having been educated in his native town, he was appointed while still very young to the professorship of poetry there; but soon after he was deprived of the post on account of the immorality of his conduct. The remaining twelve years of his short life were passed in almost constant wretchedness, and he died in his native town, and in his mother’s house, when only thirty-one years of age. Csokonai was a genial and original poet with something of the lyrical fire of Petöfi, and wrote a mock-heroic poem called Dorottya or the Triumph of the Ladies at the Carnival, two or three comedies or farces, and a number of love-poems. Most of his works have been published, with a life, by Schedel (1844–1847).
CSOMA DE KÖRÖS, ALEXANDER (c. 1790–1842), or, as the name is written in Hungarian, Körösi Csoma Sándor, Hungarian traveller and philologist, born about 1790 at Körös in Transylvania, belonged to a noble family which had sunk into poverty. He was educated at Nagy-Enyed and at Göttingen; and, in order to carry out the dream of his youth and discover the origin of his countrymen, he divided his attention between medicine and the Oriental languages. In 1820, having received from a friend the promise of an annuity of 100 florins (about £10) to support him during his travels, he set out for the East. He visited Egypt, and made his way to Tibet, where he spent four years in a Buddhist monastery studying the language and the Buddhist literature. To his intense disappointment he soon discovered that he could not thus obtain any assistance in his great object; but, having visited Bengal, his knowledge of Tibetan obtained him employment in the library of the Asiatic Society there, which possessed more than 1000 volumes in that language; and he was afterwards supported by the government while he published a Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar (both of which appeared at Calcutta in 1834). He also contributed several articles on the Tibetan language and literature to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and he published an analysis of the Kah-Gyur, the most important of the Buddhist sacred books. Meanwhile his fame had reached his native country, and procured him a pension from the government, which, with characteristic devotion to learning, he devoted to the purchase of books for Indian libraries. He spent some time in Calcutta, studying Sanskrit and several other languages; but, early in 1842, he commenced his second attempt to discover the origin of the Hungarians, but he died at Darjiling on the 11th of April 1842. An oration was delivered in his honour before the Hungarian Academy by Eötvös, the novelist.
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Fig. 1.—Schematic drawing of a Cydippid from the side. (After Chun.) | |
| A, | Adradial canals. |
| F, | Infundibulum. |
| I, | Interradial canal. |
| M, | Meridianal canal lying under a costa. |
| N, | Ciliated furrow from sense pole to costa. |
| Pg, | Paragastric canal. |
| SO, | Sense-organ. |
| St, | Stomodaeum. |
| Subs, | Subsagittal costa. |
| Subt, | Subtentacular costa. |
| T, | Tentacle. |
| Ts, | Boundaries of tentacle-sheath. |
CTENOPHORA, in zoology, a class of jelly-fish which were briefly described by Professor T. H. Huxley in 1875 (see Actinozoa, Ency. Brit. 9th ed. vol. i.) as united with what we now term Anthozoa to form the group Actinozoa; but little was known of the intimate structure of those remarkable and beautiful forms till the appearance in 1880 of C. Chun’s Monograph of the Ctenophora occurring in the Bay of Naples. They may be defined as Coelentera which exhibit both a radial and bilateral symmetry of organs; with a stomodaeum; with a mesenchyma which is partly gelatinous but partly cellular; with eight meridianal rows of vibratile paddles formed of long fused or matted cilia; lacking nematocysts (except in one genus). An example common on the British coasts is furnished by Hormiphora (Cydippe). In outward form this is an egg-shaped ball of clear jelly, having a mouth at the pointed (oral) pole, and a sense-organ at the broader (aboral) pole. It possesses eight meridians (costae) of iridescent paddles in constant vibration, which run from near one pole towards the other; it has also two pendent feathery tentacles of considerable length, which can be retracted into pouches. The mouth leads into an ectodermal stomodaeum (“stomach”), and the latter into an endodermal funnel (infundibulum); these two are compressed in planes at right angles to one another, the sectional long axis of the stomodaeum lying in the so-called sagittal (stomodaeal or gastric) plane, that of the funnel in the transverse (tentacular or funnel) plane. From the funnel, canals are given off in three directions; (a) a pair of paragastric (stomachal, or stomodaeal) canals run orally, parallel to the stomodaeum, and end blindly near the mouth; (b) a pair of perradial canals run in the transverse plane towards the equator of the animal; each of these becomes divided into two short canals at the base of the tentacle sheath which they supply, but has previously given off a pair of short interradial canals, which again bifurcate into two adradial canals; all these branches lie in the equatorial plane of the animal, but the eight adradial canals then open into eight meridianal canals which run orally and aborally under the costae; (c) a pair of aboral vessels which run towards the sense-organ, each of which bifurcates; of the four vessels thus formed, two only open at the sides of the sense-organ, forming the so-called excretory apertures. These three sets of structures, with the funnel from which they rise, make up the endodermal coelenteron, or gastro-vascular system. The generative organs are endodermal by origin, borne at the sides of the meridianal canals as indicated by the signs ♂ ♀. There exists a subepithelial plexus with nerve cells
