present archbishop’s palace, adjoining the cathedral, occupies the site of an old Benedictine convent.
Cambrai is the seat of an archbishop and a sub-prefect, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators, a chamber of commerce and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include communal colleges, ecclesiastical seminaries, and schools of drawing and music. The library has over 40,000 volumes and there is a museum of antiquities and objects of art. The chief industry of Cambrai is the weaving of muslin (batiste) and other fine fabrics (see Cambric); wool-spinning and weaving, bleaching and dyeing, are carried on, as well as the manufacture of chicory, oil, soap, sausages and metal boxes. There are also large beet-sugar works and breweries and distilleries. Trade is in cattle, grain, coal, hops, seed, &c.
Cambrai is the ancient Nervian town of Camaracum, which is mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary. In the 5th century it was the capital of the Frankish king Raguacharius. Fortified by Charlemagne, it was captured and pillaged by the Normans in 870, and unsuccessfully besieged by the Hungarians in 953. During the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries it was the scene of frequent hostilities between the bishop and his supporters on the one hand and the citizens on the other; but the latter ultimately effected their independence. In 1478 Louis XI., who had obtained possession of the town on the death of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, handed it over to the emperor, and in the 16th century Charles V. caused it to be fortified with a strong citadel, for the erection of which the castles of Cavillers, Escaudoeuvres and many others were demolished. From that date to the peace of Nijmwegen, 1678, which assigned it to France, it frequently passed from hand to hand by capture or treaty. In 1793 it was besieged in vain by the Austrians. The League of Cambrai is the name given to the alliance of Pope Julius II., Louis XII., Maximilian I., and Ferdinand the Catholic against the Venetians in 1508; and the peace of Cambrai, or as it is also called, the Ladies’ Peace, was concluded in the town in 1529 by Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I., and Margaret of Austria, aunt of Charles V., in the name of these monarchs. The bishopric of Cambrai dates from the 5th century, and was raised in 1559 to the rank of an archbishopric, which continued till the Revolution, and has since been restored. The bishops received the title of count from the emperor Henry I. (919–936), and in 1510 were raised to the dignity of dukes, their territory including the town itself and its territory, called Cambrésis.
See E. Bouly, Histoire de Cambrai et du Cambrésis (Cambria, 1843).
CAMBRIA, the Med. Lat. name for Wales. After the
end of the western Roman empire the Cymric Celts held for a
while both Wales and the land round the Solway (now Cumberland
and adjacent regions), and the former came to be called
Cambria, the latter Cumbria, though the two names were sometimes
interchanged by early medieval writers.
CAMBRIAN SYSTEM, in geology, the name now universally
employed to designate the earliest group of Palaeozoic rocks
which possesses a connected suite of fossils. The strata of this
system rest upon the Pre-Cambrian, and are succeeded by the
Ordovician system. Until the fourth decade of the 19th century
all stratified rocks older than the Carboniferous had been grouped
by geologists into a huge and indefinite “Transition Series.” In
1831 Adam Sedgwick and Sir Roderick I. Murchison began the
herculean task of studying and sub-dividing this series of rocks as
it occurs in Wales and the bordering counties of England.
Sedgwick attacked the problem in the Snowdon district, where
the rocks are highly altered and displaced and where fossils are
comparatively difficult to obtain; Murchison, on the other hand,
began to work at the upper end of the series where the stratigraphy
is simple and the fossils are abundant. Murchison
naturally made the most of the fossils collected, and was soon able
to show that the transition series could be recognized by them,
just as younger formations had fossils peculiar to themselves; as
he zealously worked on he followed the fossiliferous rocks further
afield and continually lower in the series. This fossil-bearing
set of strata he first styled the “fossiliferous greywacke series,”
changing it in 1835 to “Silurian system.”
In the same year Sedgwick introduced the name “Cambrian series” for the older and lower members. Murchison published his Silurian system in 1839, wherein he recognized the Cambrian to include the barren slates and grits of Harlech, Llanberis and the Long Mynd. So far, the two workers had been in agreement; but in his presidential address to the Geological Society of London in 1842 Murchison stated his opinion that the Cambrian contained no fossils that differed from those of the Lower Silurian. Whereupon Sedgwick undertook a re-examination of the Welsh rocks with the assistance of J. W. Salter, the palaeontologist; and in 1852 he included the Llandeilo and Bala beds (Silurian) in the Upper Cambrian. Two years later Murchison brought out his Siluria, in which he treated the Cambrian system as a mere local facies of the Silurian system, and he included in the latter, under J. Barrande’s term “Primordial zone,” all the lower rocks, although they had a distinctive fauna.
Meanwhile in Europe and America fossils were being collected from similar rocks which were classed as Silurian, and the use of “Cambrian” was almost discarded, because, following Murchison, it was taken to apply only to a group of rocks without a characteristic fauna and therefore impossible to recognize. Most of the Cambrian rocks were coloured as Silurian on the British official geological maps.
Nevertheless, from 1851 to 1855, Sedgwick, in his writings on the British palaeozoic deposits, insisted on the independence of the Cambrian system, and though Murchison had pushed his Silurian system downward in the series of rocks, Sedgwick adhered to the original grouping of his Cambrian system, and even proposed to limit the Silurian to the Ludlow and Wenlock beds with the May Hill Sandstone at the base. This attitude he maintained until the year of his death (1873), when there appeared his introduction to Salter’s Catalogue of Cambrian and Silurian Fossils.
It is not to be supposed that one of these great geologists was necessarily in the wrong; each had right on his side. It was left for the subsequent labours of Salter and H. Hicks to prove that the rocks below the undoubted lower Silurian of Murchison did indeed possess a characteristic fauna, and their work was confirmed by researches going on in other countries. To-day the recognition of the earliest fossil-bearing rocks, below the Llandeilo formation of Murchison, as belonging to the Cambrian system, and the threefold subdivision of the system according to palaeontological evidence, may be regarded as firmly established.
It should be noted that A. de Lapparent classifies the Cambrian as the lowest stage in the Silurian, the middle and upper stages being Ordovician and Gothlandian. E. Renevier proposed to use Silurique to cover the same period with the Cambrian as the lowest series, but these differences of treatment are merely nominal. Jules Marcou and others have used Taconic (Taconian) as the equivalent of Cambrian, and C. Lapworth proposed to apply the same term to the lowest sub-division only; he had also used “Annelidian” in the same sense. These names are of historical interest alone.
Cambrian Rocks.—The lithological characters of the Cambrian rocks possess a remarkable uniformity in all quarters of the globe. Muds, sands, grits and conglomerates are the predominant types. In Scotland, North America and Canada important deposits of limestone occur and subordinate limestones are found in the Cambrian of central Europe.
In some regions, notably in the Baltic province and in parts of the United States, the rocks still retain their original horizontality of deposition, the muds are scarcely indurated and the sands are still incoherent; but in most parts of the world they bear abundant evidence of the many movements and stresses to which they have been exposed through so enormous a period of time. Thus, we find them more frequently, folded, tilted and cleaved; the muds have become shales, slates, phyllites or schists, the grey and red sands and conglomerates have become quartzites and greywackes, while the limestones are very generally dolomitized. In the Cambrian limestones, as in their more
