ventrals below or rarely in front of it. Their gill-openings are reduced to a short slit. The first group of this section comprises alpine forms of the Andes, without any armature, and with a very broad and pendent lower lip. They have been referred to several genera (Stygogenes, Arges, Brontes, Astroblepus), but are collectively called “preñadillas” by the natives, who state that they live in subterranean craters within the bowels of the volcanoes of the Andes, and are ejected with streams of mud and water during eruptions. These fishes may, however, be found in surface waters at all times, and their appearance in great quantities in the low country during volcanic eruptions can be accounted for by numbers being killed by the sulphuretted gases which escape during an eruption and by their being swept down with the torrents of water issuing from the volcano. The lowland forms have their body encased in large scutes, either rough, scale-like, and arranged in four or five series (Chaetostomus), or polished, forming broad rings round the slender and depressed tail (Loricaria, fig. 5). They are mostly of small size.
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| Fig. 6.—Abdomen of Aspredo batrachus, with the ova attached; at a the ova are removed, to show the spongy structure of the skin, and the processes filling the interspaces between the ova. |
In certain of the mailed genera the secondary sexual differences may be very pronounced, and have given rise to many nominal species. The shape of the snout may differ according to the sex, and its margin may be beset with tentacles in the male, whilst it frequently happens that the head of the latter is margined with spines or bristles which are either absent or considerably shorter in the female.
The Aspredinidae, which are also closely related to the Siluridae, are represented by four genera and eighteen species from South America. Aspredo batrachus (fig. 6), of the Guianas, the largest form, reaching to about a foot in length, deserves notice from the manner in which the female carries her eggs attached to the belly and paired fins, in a single layer, each egg being connected with the skin by a cup-shaped pedunculate base supplied with blood-vessels and coated with a layer of epithelium, the formation of which is still unexplained. (G. A. B.)
CATGUT, the name applied to cord of great toughness and tenacity prepared from the intestines of sheep, or occasionally from those of the horse, mule and ass. Those of the cat are not employed, and therefore it is supposed that the word is properly kitgut, kit meaning “fiddle,” and that the present form has arisen through confusion with kit=cat. The substance is used for the strings of harps and violins, as well as other stringed musical instruments, for hanging the weights of clocks, for bow-strings, and for suturing wounds in surgery. To prepare it the intestines are cleaned, freed from fat, and steeped for some time in water, after which their external membrane is scraped off with a blunt knife. They are then steeped for some time in an alkaline ley, smoothed and equalized by drawing out, subjected to the antiseptic action of the fumes of burning sulphur, if necessary dyed, sorted into sizes, and twisted together into cords of various numbers of strands according to their uses. The best strings for musical instruments are imported from Italy (“Roman strings”); and it is found that lean and ill-fed animals yield the toughest gut.
CATHA, the khat of the Arabs, a shrub widely distributed and much cultivated in Arabia and tropical Africa from, Abyssinia to the Cape. The dried leaves are used for the preparation of a kind of tea and also as tobacco. The plant is a member of the natural order Celastraceae, a family of shrubs and trees found in temperate and tropical climates and represented in Britain by the spindle-tree (Euonymus europaeus).
CATHARS a widespread heretical sect of the middle ages. They were the debris of an early Christianity, scattered in the 10th to 14th centuries over East and West, having their analogues in the Mahommedan world as well. In the East they were called Bogomils (q.v.) and Paulicians; in the West, Patarenes, Tixerands (i.e. Weavers), Bulgars, Concorricii, Albanenses, Albigeois, &c.; in both, Cathars and Manicheans. This article relates to the Western Cathars, as they appear (1) in the Cathar Ritual written in Provençal and preserved in a 13th-century MS. in Lyons, published by Clédat, Paris, 1888; (2) in Bernard Gui’s Practica inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis, edited by Canon C. Douais, Paris, 1886; and (3) in the procès verbal of the inquisitors’ reports. Some were downright dualists, and believed that there are two gods or principles, one of good and the other of evil, both eternal; but as a rule they subordinated the evil to the good. All were universalists in so far as they believed in the ultimate salvation of all men.[1]
Their tenets were as follows:—The evil god, Satan, who inspired the malevolent parts of the Old Testament, is god and lord of this world, of the things that are seen and are temporal, and especially of the outward man which is decaying, of the earthen vessel, of the body of death, of the flesh which takes us captive under the law of sin and desire. This world is the only true purgatory and hell, being the antithesis of the world eternal, of the inward man renewed day by day, of Christ’s peace and kingdom which are not of this world. Men are the result of a primal war in heaven, when hosts of angels incited by Satan or Lucifer to revolt were driven out, and were imprisoned in terrestrial bodies created for them by the adversary. But there are also celestial bodies, bodies spiritual and not natural. These the angel souls left behind in heaven, and they are buildings from God, houses not made with hands, tunics eternal.
- ↑ A certain Peter (Doc. Doat., 22, p. 98) declared that could he but get hold of the false and perfidious God of the Catholics who created a thousand men in order to save a single one and damn all the rest, he would break him to pieces and tear him asunder with his nails and spit in his face.
