by General Walker in the passage already quoted believed it to be. Decision after decision of individual instances has made it a settled practice for the Federal government to co-operate with or to supplement the state governments in the gathering of statistics that may furnish a basis for state or Federal legislation. The law has allowed the Federal census office in its discretion to compile and publish the birth statistics of divisions in which they are accurately kept; one Federal report on the statistics of marriages and divorces throughout the country from 1867 to 1886 inclusive was published in 1889, and a second for the succeeding twenty-year period was published in 1908–1909; an annual volume gives the statistics of deaths for about half the population of the country, including all the states and cities which have approximately complete records of deaths; Federal agencies like the bureau of labour and the bureau of corporations have been created for the purpose of gathering certain social and industrial statistics, and the bureau of the census has been made a permanent statistical office.
The Federal census office has been engaged in the compilation and publication of statistics of many sorts. Among its important lines of work may be mentioned frequent reports during the cotton ginning season upon the amount of cotton ginned, supplemental census reports upon occupations, on employees and wages, and on further interpretation of various population tables, reports on street and electric railways, on mines and quarries, on electric light and power plants, on deaths in the registration area 1900–1904, on benevolent institutions, on the insane, on paupers in almshouses, on the social statistics of cities and on the census of manufactures in 1905. Congress has recently entrusted it with still further duties, and it has developed into the main statistical office of the Federal government, finding its nearest analogue probably in the Imperial Statistical Office in Berlin. (W. F. W.)
CENTAUREA, in botany, a genus of the natural order Compositae, containing between four and five hundred species, and of wide distribution, but with its principal centre in the Mediterranean region. The plants are herbs with entire or cut often spiny-toothed leaves, and ovoid or globose involucres surrounding a number of tubular, oblique or two-lipped florets, the outer of which are usually larger and neuter, the inner bisexual. Four species are native in Britain. C. nigra is knapweed, common in meadows and pastureland; C. Cyanus is the bluebottle or cornflower, a well-known cornfield weed; C. Calcitrapa is star-thistle, a rare plant, found in dry waste places in the south of England, and characterized by the rose-purple flower-heads enveloped by involucral bracts which end in a long, stiff spine. Besides cornflower, a few other species are worth growing as garden plants; they are readily grown in ordinary soil:—C. Cineraria, a half-hardy perennial, native of Italy, is remarkable for its white downy foliage; C. babylonica (Levant) has large downy leaves and a tall spike of small yellow flowers; C. dealbata (Caucasus) is a low-growing plant with larger rose-coloured heads; C. macrocephala (Caucasus) has large yellow heads; C. montana (Pyrenees) large handsome blue heads; and C. ragusina (S.E. Europe) beautiful silver-haired leaves and yellow flowers.
CENTAURS, in Greek mythology, a race of beings part horse part man, dwelling in the mountains of Thessaly and Arcadia. The name has been derived (1) from κεντεῖν (goad) and ταῦρος (bull), implying a people who were primarily herdsmen, (2) from κεντεῖν and the common termination -αυρος or αὔρα (“air”) i.e. “spearmen.” The former is unsatisfactory partly from the philological standpoint, and the latter, though not certain, is preferable. The centaurs were the offspring of Ixion and Nephele (the rain-cloud), or of Kentauros (the son of these two) and some Magnesian mares or of Apollo and Hebe. They are best known for their fight with the Lapithae, caused by their attempt to carry off Deidameia on the day of her marriage to Peirithous, king of the Lapithae, himself the son of Ixion. Theseus, who happened to be present, assisted Peirithous, and the Centaurs were driven off (Plutarch, Theseus, 30; Ovid, Metam. xii. 210; Diod. Sic. iv. 69, 70). In later times they are often represented drawing the car of Dionysus, or bound and ridden by Eros, in allusion to their drunken and amorous habits. Their general character is that of wild, lawless and inhospitable beings, the slaves of their animal passions, with the exception of Pholus and Chiron. They are variously explained by a fancied resemblance to the shapes of clouds, or as spirits of the rushing mountain torrents or winds. As children of Apollo, they are taken to signify the rays of the sun. It is suggested as the origin of the legend, that the Greeks in early times, to whom riding was unfamiliar, regarded the horsemen of the northern hordes as one and the same with their horses; hence the idea of the Centaur as half-man, half-animal. Like the defeat of the Titans by Zeus, the contests with the Centaurs typified the struggle between civilization and barbarism.
In early art they were represented as human beings in front, with the body and hind legs of a horse attached to the back: later, they were men only as far as the waist. The battle with the Lapithae, and the adventure of Heracles with Pholus (Apollodorus, ii. 5; Diod. Sic. iv. II) are favourite subjects of Greek art (see Sidney Colvin, Journal of Hellenic Studies, i. 1881, and the exhaustive article in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie). Fig. 34 in article Greek Art (the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia) represents the attempt of the Centaurs to carry off the bride of Peirithous.
CENTAURUS (“The Centaur”), in astronomy, a constellation of the southern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus (4th century B.C.) and Aratus (3rd century B.C.), Ptolemy catalogued thirty-seven stars in it. α-Centauri is a splendid binary star. Its components are of the 1st magnitude, and revolve in a period of eighty-one years; and since its parallax is 0.75″, it is the nearest star to the earth; ω-Centauri, the finest globular star-cluster in the heavens, consists of about 6000 stars in a space of about 20′ diameter, of which about 125 variables have been examined. Nova Centauri, a “new” star, was discovered in 1895 by Mrs Fleming in photographs taken at Harvard.
CENTAURY (Erythraea Centaurium, natural order Gentianaceae), an annual herb with erect, smooth stem, usually branched above, and a terminal inflorescence with numerous small red or pink regular flowers with a funnel-shaped corolla. The plant occurs in dry pastures and on sandy coasts in Britain, and presents many varieties, differing in length of stem, degree of branching, width and shape of leaves, and laxity or closeness of the inflorescence. Several other species of the genus are grown as rock-plants.
CENTENARY (from Lat. centenarius, of or belonging to a hundred, from centeni, distributive of centum, hundred), a space of a hundred years, and particularly the celebration of an event on the lapse of a hundred years, a centennial anniversary. The word “centennial” (from Lat. centennis, from centum, and annus, a year), though usually an adjective as in “the Centennial State,” the name given to Colorado on its admission to statehood in 1876, is also used as a synonym of centenary.
CENTERVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Appanoose county, Iowa, U.S.A., in the south part of the state, about 90 m. N.W. of Keokuk. Pop. (1890) 3668; (1900) 5256; (1905, state census) 5967 (487 being foreign-born); (1910) 6936. Centerville is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific and the Iowa Central railways. Among the principal buildings are the county court-house and the Federal building, and the city has a public library and a hospital. It is in one of the most productive coal regions of the state; it ships coal, limestone and livestock, has large bottling works, and manufactures iron, brick and tile, machine-shop products, woollen goods, shirts, cigars and flour. The place was platted in 1846, was called Chaldea until 1849, when the present name was adopted, was incorporated as a town in 1855, and in 1870 was chartered as a city of the second class. The city limits were extended in 1906–1907.
CENTIPEDE, the characteristic member of the group Chilopoda, a class of the Arthropoda, formerly associated with the Diplopoda (Millipedes), the Pauropoda and the Symphyla, to constitute the now abandoned group Myriapoda. The resemblance between the Chilopoda and the Diplopoda is principally superficial and due to the elongation and vermiform shape of the body, which in both is composed of a number of similar or subsimilar somites not differentiated as are those of Insecta, existing Arachnida and most Crustacea, into series or “tagmata” of varying function. Until 1893 no one doubted the correctness of the assumption that the Chilopoda and Diplopoda were orders of a class Myriapoda of the same systematic status as the Arachnida or Hexapoda. But in that year, R. I. Pocock and J. S. Kingsley independently pointed out that they differ as much from each other as either differs from the Hexapoda; and should, therefore,
