Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/115

This page needs to be proofread.
CAR—CAR
103

tricts of Asia Minor passed successively under the Syrian kings and those of Pergamus. It was united with the Roman empire after the extinction of the latter dynasty, and became a part of the Roman province of Asia. From this period it has no separate history of its own, and in common with the rest of Asia Minor became a part of the monarchy, first of the Seljukian and afterwards of the

Ottoman Turks.

The principal cities of Caria in ancient times were Cnidus and Halicarnassus on the sea-coast, and Alabanda, Mylasa, and Stratonicea in the interior. At the present day, Budrum, which occupies the site of Halicarnassus, is still a place of some importance; while the two most con siderable towns in the interior are Melassa (the ancient Mylasa) and Mughla,in the centre of the high inland plateau. The portions of the province adjoining the valley of the Maeander are fertile, and produce excellent figs and raisins ; while the mountains near the sea-coast are for the most part clothed with forests, which render the scenery of the district among the most beautiful in Asia Minor.

(e. h. b.)

CARIACO, or San Felipe de Austria, a town on the north coast of Venezuela, in the state of Cumana, situated at the east end of the gulf to which it gives its name, in 10 27 45" N. lat. and 63 13 21" W. long. The surrounding district produces cotton of the finest quality. Population about 7000.

CARIBBEAN SEA, that part of the Atlantic Ocean lying between the coasts of Central and South America and the islands of Cuba, Hayti, and Porto Rico, and the Leeward and Windward Islands.

CARIBBEE ISLANDS, in its more extended sense, is a name applied to the whole of the West Indies ; but strictly, it only comprehends that cluster of islands stretching from Porto Rico to the coast of South America, and known as the Leeward and Windward Islands. See West Indies.

CARIBS (in German Karaiben), a people of Red Indian race, which, at the time of the discovery of America by Columbus, was the most important along the northern coast of the southern continent, and in a number of the islands of what is still known as the Caribbean Sea. They were a strongly built, warlike, and aggressive people, and offered a pertinacious resistance to the advances of the Europeans, before whose arrival they had rendered them selves an object of terror to the other inhabitants of the region. They appear to have been addicted to canni balism, and the very word cannibal is not improbably derived from a corruption of their name. From the islands they have for the most part disappeared, and their principal settlement is now in the republic of Honduras, where they form a very industrious and prosperous part of the population, while still retaining their original language and many of their peculiar customs. They are to be found principally in the district between the Paitook river and the Belize. Their immigration into Honduras dates only from about 1796, when the English, weary of the continual disturbances which they occasioned, transported them in a body from Dominica and St Vincent to the island of Ruotan. In these islands they divided into two great tribes, known as the Red and the Black Caribs, of whom the former were the pure descendants of the ancient stock, while the latter were largely inter mingled with Negro blood. To the same race probably belong the Galibi in French Guiana, the Yaoi in Venezuela, the Cumanagotto, the Pariagotto, and various other tribes of the continent.

CARICATURE (Italian caricatura, i.e., “ritratto ridicolo,” from caricare, to load, to charge ; French charge) may be defined as the art of applying the grotesque to the purposes of satire. The word " caricatura " was first used as English by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), in his j Christian Morals, a posthumous work; it is next found, still in its Italian form, in No, 537 of the Spectator ; it was adopted by Johnson in his Dictionary (1757), and only assumed its modern guise toward the end of the 18th century, when its use and comprehension became general.

Little that is not conjectural can be written concerning caricature among the ancients. Few traces of the comic are discoverable in Egyptian art, three papyri only of a satirical tendency being known to exist, and these appear ing to belong rather to the class of ithyphallic drolleries than to that of the ironical grotesque. Among the Greeks, though but few and dubious data are extant, it seems possible that caricature may not have been altogether unknown. Their taste for pictorial parody, indeed, has been suffi ciently proved by plentiful discoveries of pottery painted with burlesque subjects. Aristotle, moreover, who dis approved of the grotesque in art, condemns in strong terms the pictures of a certain Pauson, who, alluded to by Aristophanes, and the subject of one of Lucian s anecdotes, is hailed by M. Champfleury as the doyen of caricaturists. That the grotesque in plastic art was practised by the Romans is evident from the curious frescoes unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum ; from the mention in Pliny of certain painters celebrated for burlesque pictures ; fiom the curious fantasies graven in gems and called Grylli ; and from the number of ithyphallic caprices that have descended to modern times. But in spite of these evidences of Greek and Roman humour, in spite of the famous comic statuette of Caracalla, and of the more famous graffito of the Crucifixion, the caricaturists of the old world must be sought for, not among its painters and sculptors, but among its poets and dramatists. The comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of Martial were, to the Athens of Pericles and the Rome of Domitian, what the etchings of Gillray and the lithographs of Daumier were to the London of George III. and the Paris of the Citizen King.

During the long dusk of the Middle Ages a vast mass

of material was accumulated for the study ot the grotesque, but selection becomes even more difficult than with the scarce relics of antiquity. With the building of the cathedrals originated a new style of art ; a strange mixture of memories of paganism and Christian imaginings was called into being for the adornment of those great strongholds of urban Catholicism, and in this the coarse and brutal materialism of the popular humour found its largest and freest expression. On missal-marge and sign -board, on stall and entablature, in gurgoyle and initial, the grotesque displayed itself in an infinite variety of forms. Often obscene and horrible, often quaint and fantastic, it is difficult, if not absolutely impossible, to determine the import of this inextricable tangle of imagery. It has been pretended that it constituted an immense network of symbolism, in which the truths of the Church were set forth in forms intelligible to the popular mind. A second interpretation is that it is merely the result of the decor ative artist s caprice. A third school has sought to dis cover in much of it the evidences of the struggle for supremacy between the secular clergy and the friars. Leaving all this on one side, however, until the appli cation to archaeology of the comparative method shall have made the matter somewhat clearer, it will be sufficient in this place to remark the prevalence of three great popular types, or figures, each of which may be credited with a satirical intention, of Reynard the Fox, the hero of the famous medieval romance ; of the Devil, that peculiarly mediaeval antithesis of God ; and of Death, the sarcastic and irreverent skeleton. The popularity of the last is

evidenced by the fact that no less than forty-three towns