Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/83

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CAP—CAP
71

a specific cohesion nearly equal to that of mercury. Water, the carbonates and sulphates, and probably phosphates, and the metals, platinum, gold, silver, cadmium, tin, and copper have a specific cohesion double that of mercury. Zinc, iron, and palladium, three times that of mercury, and

sodium, six times that of mercury.


Relation of Surface-tension to Temperature.

It appears from the experiments of Brunner and of Wolff on the ascent of water in tubes that at the temperature t centigrade

T = 75"20 (1 - 00187<:) (Brunner); = 76-08 (I -0-002^ + -00000415* 2 ), for a tube "02346 cm. dia meter (Wolff) ; = 77-34 (1 - 0-00181/!), for a tube 03098 cm. diameter (Wolff).

Sir W. Thomson has applied the principles of Thermody namics to determine the thermal effects of increasing or diminishing the area of the free surface of a liquid, and has shown that in order to keep the temperature constant while the area of the surface increases by unity, an amount of heat must be supplied to the liquid which is dynamically equivalent to the product of the absolute temperature into the decrement of the surface-tension per degree of tempera ture. We may call this the latent heat of surface-extension.

It appears from the experiments of Brunner and Wolff that at ordinary temperatures the latent heat of extension of the surface of water is dynamically equivalent to about half the mechanical work done in producing the surface- extension.

(j. c. m.)





CAPIS, or Capiz, a town of the Philippine Islands, in a province of the same name, on the north coast of Panay, at the mouth of the rivers Panay, Panitan, and Ivisan, which are subject to inundations during the rainy season. It is the seat of a Spanish alcalde, and is defended by a small fort. Most of its buildings are light erections of nipa palm. Its exports are mainly rice, dyewood, gold-dust, and cattle. Population, 11,470. Lat. 11 25 N., long. 122 45 E.


CAPISTRANO, Giovanni di (1386-1456), was born at the little town of Capistrano in the Abruzzi. He was educated for the profession of law, and till about his thirtieth year was engaged in practice as an advocate. He then entered the Franciscan order, and became one of its most rigid and devoted adherents. At the same time he manifested very remarkable powers as a popular preacher, and was consequently employed on various missions by the popes. In 1450 he was sent by Nicholas V. to Germany to preach against the Hussite heresy, and at the same time to excite the Germans to a crusade against the Turks who, under their great leader, Mahomet II., were threatening to overrun Europe. Capistrano did much to repress the Hussite movement, and though he failed to excite a crusade against the Turks, his religious enthusiasm sustained the inhabitants of Belgrade when that town was besieged by the Turkish forces in 1456. He accompanied them with the cross in his hand in their successful sortie, a few months before his death. He was canonized in 1690.


CAPITAL, in social discussions sometimes treated as antithetical to Labour, is in reality the accumulated savings of labour and of the profits accruing from the savings of labour. It is that portion of the annual produce reserved from, consumption to supply future wants, to extend the sphere of production, to improve industrial instruments and processes, to carry out works of public utility, and, in short, to secure and enlarge the various means of progress necessary to an increasing community. It is the increment of wealth or means of subsistence analogous to the increment of population and of the wants of civilized man. Hence Mr Mill and other economists, when seeking a graphic expression of the service of capital, have called it "abstinence." The labourer serves by giving physical and mental effort in order to supply his means of consumption. The capitalist, or labourer-capitalist, serves by abstaining from consumption, by denying himself the present enjoyment of more or less of his means of consumption, in the prospect of a future profit. This quality, apparent enough in the beginnings of capital, applies equally to all its forms and stages; because whether a capitalist stocks his warehouse with goods and produce, improves land, lends on mortgage or other security, builds a factory, opens a mine, or orders the construction of machines or ships, there is the element of self-deprival for the present, with the risk of ultimate loss of what is his own, and what, instead of saving and embodying in some productive form, he might choose to consume. On this ground rests the justification of the claims of capital to its industrial rewards, whether in the form of rent, interest, or profits of trade and investment.

To any advance in the arts of industry or the comforts of life, a rate of production exceeding the rate of consumption, with consequent accumulation of resources, or in other words, the formation of capital, is indispensable. The primitive cultivators of the soil, whether those of ancient times or the modern pioneers who have formed settlements in the forests of the New World, soon discovered that their labour would be rendered more effective by implements and auxiliary powers of various kinds, and that until the produce from existing means of cultivation exceeded what was necessary for their subsistence, there could be neither labour on their part to produce such implements and auxiliaries, nor means to purchase them. Every branch of industry has thus had a demand for capital within its own circles from the earliest times. The flint arrow-heads, the stone and bronze utensils of fossiliferous origin, and the rude implements of agriculture, war, and navigation, of which we read in Homer, were the forerunners of that rich and wonderful display of tools, machines, engines, furnaces, and countless ingenious and costly appliances, which represent so large a portion of the capital of civilized countries, and without the pre-existing capital could not have been developed. Nor in the cultivation of land, or the production simply of food, is the need of implements, and of other auxiliary power, whether animal or mechanical, the only need immediately experienced. The demands on the surplus of produce over consumption are various and incessant. Near the space of reclaimed ground, from which the cultivator derives but a bare livelihood, are some marshy acres that, if drained and enclosed, would add considerably in two or three years to the produce; the forest and other natural obstructions might also be driven farther back with the result, in a few more years, of profit; fences are necessary to allow of pasture and field crops, roads have to be made and farm buildings to be erected; as the work proceeds more artificial investments follow, and by these successive outlays of past savings in improvements, renewed and enhanced from generation to generation, the land, of little value in its natural state either to the owner and cultivator or the community, is at length brought into a highly productive condition. The history of capital in the soil is substantially the history of capital in all other spheres. No progress can be made in any sphere, small or large, without reserved funds possessed by few or more persons, in small or large amounts, and the progress in all cases is adventured under self-deprival in the meanwhile of acquired value, and more or less risk as to the final result.