Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/583

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CAVA DEI TIRRENI—CAVAIGNAC
  

in a succession of rapids and broken cascades. After entering the Madras presidency, the Cauvery forms the boundary between the Coimbatore and Salem districts, until it strikes into Trichinopoly district. Sweeping past the historic rock of Trichinopoly, it breaks at the island of Seringam into two channels, which enclose between them the delta of Tanjore, the garden of southern India. The northern channel is called the Coleroon (Kolidam); the other preserves the name of Cauvery. On the seaward face of its delta are the open roadsteads of Negapatam and French Karikal. The only navigation on any portion of its course is carried on in boats of basket-work. It is in the delta that the real value of the river for irrigation becomes conspicuous. This is the largest delta system, and the most profitable of all the works in India. The most ancient irrigation work is a massive dam of unhewn stone, 1080 ft. long, and from 40 to 60 ft. broad, across the stream of the Cauvery proper, which is supposed to date back to the 4th century, is still in excellent repair, and has supplied a model to British engineers. The area of the ancient system was 669,000 acres, the modern about 1,000,000 acres. The chief modern work is the anicut across the Coleroon, 2250 ft. long, constructed by Sir Arthur Cotton between 1836 and 1838. The Cauvery Falls have been utilized for an electric installation, which supplies power to the Kolar gold-mines and light to the city of Mysore.

The Cauvery is known to devout Hindus as Dakshini Ganga, or the Ganges of the south, and the whole of its course is holy ground. According to the legend there was once born upon earth a girl named Vishnumaya or Lopamudra, the daughter of Brahma; but her divine father permitted her to be regarded as the child of a mortal, called Kavera-muni. In order to obtain beatitude for her adoptive father, she resolved to become a river whose waters should purify from all sin. Hence it is that even the holy Ganges resorts underground once in the year to the source of the Cauvery, to purge herself from the pollution contracted from the crowd of sinners who have bathed in her waters.


CAVA DEI TIRRENI, a town and episcopal see of Campania, Italy, in the province of Salerno, 6 m. N.W. by rail from the town of Salerno. Pop. (1901) town, 7611; commune, 23,415. It lies fairly high in a richly cultivated valley, surrounded by wooded hills, and is a favourite resort of foreigners in spring and autumn, and of the Neapolitans in summer. A mile to the south-west is the village of Corpo di Cava (1970 ft.), with the Benedictine abbey of La Trinità della Cava, founded in 1025 by St Alferius. The church and the greater part of the buildings were entirely modernized in 1796. The old Gothic cloisters are preserved. The church contains a fine organ and several ancient sarcophagi. The archives, now national property, include documents and MSS. of great value (e.g. the Codex Legum Longobardorum of 1004) and fine incunabula. The abbot is keeper, and also head of a boarding school.

See M. Morcaldi, Codex Diplomaticus Cavensis ( Naples and Milan, 1873–1893).


CAVAEDIUM, in architecture, the Latin name for the central hall or court within a Roman house, of which five species are described by Vitruvius. (1) The Tuscanicum responds to the greater number apparently of those at Pompeii, in which the timbers of the roof are framed together, so as to leave an open space in the centre, known as the compluvium; it was through this opening that all the light was received, not only in the hall itself, but in the rooms round. The rain from the roof was collected in gutters round the compluvium, and discharged from thence into a tank or open basin in the floor called the impluvium. (2) In the tetrastylon additional support was required in consequence of the dimensions of the hall; this was given by columns placed at the four angles of the impluvium. (3) Corinthian is the term given to the species where additional columns were required. (4) In the displuviatum the roofs, instead of sloping down towards the compluvium, sloped outwards, the gutters being on the outer walls; there was still an opening in the roof, and an impluvium to catch the rain falling through. This species of roof, Vitruvius states, is constantly in want of repair, as the water does not easily run away, owing to the stoppage in the rain-water pipes. (5) The testudinatum was employed when the hall was small and another floor was built over it; no example of this type has been found at Pompeii, and only one of the cavaedium displuviatum.


CAVAGNARI, SIR PIERRE LOUIS NAPOLEON (1841–1879), British military administrator, the son of a French general by his marriage with an Irish lady, was born at Stenay, in the department of the Meuse, on the 4th of July 1841. He nevertheless obtained naturalization as an Englishman, and entered the military service of the East India Company. After passing through the college at Addiscombe, he served through the Oudh campaign against the mutineers in 1858 and 1859. In 1861 he was appointed an assistant commissioner in the Punjab, and in 1877 became deputy commissioner of Peshawar and took part in several expeditions against the hill tribes. In 1878 he was attached to the staff of the British mission to Kabul, which the Afghans refused to allow to proceed. In May 1879, after the death of the amir Shere Ali, Cavagnari negotiated and signed the treaty of Gandamak with his successor, Yakub Khan. By this the Afghans agreed to admit a British resident at Kabul, and the post was conferred on Cavagnari, who also received the Star of India and was made a K.C.B. He took up his residence in July, and for a time all seemed to go well, but on the 3rd of September Cavagnari and the other European members of the mission were massacred in a sudden rising of mutinous Afghan troops. (See Afghanistan.)


CAVAIGNAC, JEAN BAPTISTE French politician, was born at Gourdon (Lot). He was sent by his department as deputy to the Convention, where he associated himself with the party of the Mountain and voted for the death of Louis XVI. He was constantly employed on missions in the provinces, and distinguished himself by his rigorous repression of opponents of the revolution in the departments of Landes, Basses-Pyrénées and Gers. With his colleague Jacques Pinet (1754–1844) he established at Bayonne a revolutionary tribunal with authority in the neighbouring towns. Charges of cruelty were preferred against him by a local society before the Convention in 1795, but were dismissed. He had represented the Convention in the armies of Brest and of the Eastern Pyrenees in 1793, and in 1795 he was sent to the armies of the Moselle and the Rhine. He filled various minor administrative offices, and in 1806 became an official at Naples in Murat’s government. During the Hundred Days he was prefect of the Somme. At the restoration he was proscribed as a regicide, and spent the last years of his life at Brussels, where he died on the 24th of March 1829. His second son was General Eugène Cavaignac (q.v.).

The eldest son, Eléonore Louis Godefroi Cavaignac (1801–1845), was, like his father, a republican of the intransigeant type. He was bitterly disappointed at the triumph of the monarchical principle after the revolution of July 1830, in which he had taken part. He took part in the Parisian risings of October 1830, 1832 and 1834. On the third occasion he was imprisoned, but escaped to England in 1835. When he returned to France in 1841 he worked on the staff of La Réforme, and carried on an energetic republican propaganda. In 1843 he became president of the Society of the Rights of Man, of which he had been one of the founders in 1832. He died on the 5th of May 1845. The recumbent statue (1847) of Godefroi Cavaignac on his tomb at Montmartre (Paris) is one of the masterpieces of the sculptor Francois Rude.

Jean Baptiste’s brother, Jacques-Marie, Vicomte Cavaignac (1773–1855), French general, served with distinction in the army under the republic and successive governments. He commanded the cavalry of the XI. corps in the retreat from Moscow, and eventually became Vicomte Cavaignac and inspector-general of cavalry.


CAVAIGNAC, LOUIS EUGÈNE (1802–1857), French general, son of J. B. Cavaignac, was born at Paris on the 15th of October 1802. After going through the usual course of study for the military profession, he entered the army as an engineer officer in 1824, and served in the Morea in 1828, becoming captain in the following year. When the revolution of 1830 broke out