CHILON, one of the seven sages of Greece, was a Lacedæmonian by birth His father's name was Damagetos, and he appears to have flourished about the beginning of the 6th century B.C. In 556 B.C. he acted as ephor eponymous, but little more is known of his life. He is said to have died of joy on hearing that his son had gained a prize at the Olympic games. Diogenes Laertius tells us that he composed elegies, but none of these are extant. Many of his apophthegms have been handed down. They show much of the weight and brevity that might be expected in a Spartan, but are not so pointed and severe as those of Bias. According to Chilon the great virtue of man was prudence, or well grounded judgment as to future events. (Diog. Laer., i. §§ 68–73; Mullach, Frag. Phil. Græc., i.).
CHILTERN HILLS, a range of chalk hills in England, extending through part of Oxford, Buckingham, and Bedford, and attaining their highest elevation of 904 feet in the neighbourhood of Wendover. At one time the Chilterns were thickly covered with a forest of beech, and the western district of Bernwood was only cleared by James I. The depredations of the bandits, who found shelter within their recesses, became at an early period so alarming that a special officer, known as the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, was appointed for the protection of the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts. The necessity for such an appointment has disappeared long ago, but the three hundreds of Stoke, Burnham, and Desborough in Buckingham are still distinguished by the old name, and a steward is still nominated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a salary of 20s. and the fees of the office. The sole importance of the sinecure consists in the fact that its acceptance enables a member of the House of Commons to resign his seat, on the plea that he holds a place of honour and profit under the Crown. This appropriation of the post only dates from the middle of the 18th century, and its intrinsic legality has been called in question; but the custom is now completely legitimated by a long line of precedents. An application for the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds was once refused, in 1842.
CHIMÆRA, in Grecian fable, a monster resembling a lion in the fore part, a goat in the middle, and a dragon behind, and having three heads corresponding to the three parts of her body. Each mouth breathed forth fire, and she committed great ravages throughout Caria and Lycia, till she was overthrown by Bellerophon, mounted on the winged horse Pegasus. Some have supposed that the myth owed its origin to the volcanic mountain Chimæra, in Lycia, where works have been found containing representations of the lion. In modern art, the Chimæra is usually represented as a lion, out of the back of which grow the neck and head of a goat. As a general term chimæra signifies any fiction of the imagination made up of incongruous elements, or, generally, any fantastic idea or impracticable scheme of action.
CHIMAY, a town of Belgium, in the province of Hainault, on the Eaublanche, or White Water, about 28 miles south of Charleroi. It contains 3000 inhabitants, and has ironworks, marble quarries, breweries, and potteries. In 1470 it was raised to the rank of a countship by Charles the Bold, and in 1486 was erected into a principality in favour of Charles of Croy. Since that date it has passed in 1686 to the counts of Bossu, and in 1804 to the French family of Riquet de Caraman. In 1805 Prince Francis Joseph Philippe married the daughter of the Spanish minister Cabarrus, a woman of great wit and beauty, who had been previously the wife of M. de Fontenay and of Tallien, and had taken an active part in the overthrow of Robespierre. Their son Joseph, born in 1808, is the present possessor of the title, and has held the office of Belgian plenipotentiary.
CHINA
THE account of this great empire of Eastern Asia may fitly commence with a brief notice, 1st, of China as known to the ancients (the land of Sinæ or Seres), and, 2d, of China as known to mediæval Europe (Cathay).
China as known to the Ancients.
The spacious seat of ancient civilization which we call China has loomed always so large to Western eyes, and has, in spite of the distance, subtended so large an angle of vision, that, at eras far apart, we find it to have been distinguished by different appellations, according as it was reached by the southern sea-route, or by the northern land-route traversing the longitude of Asia.
In the former aspect the name has nearly always been some form of the name Sin, Chin, Sinæ, China. In the latter point of view the region in question was known to the ancients as the land of the Seres, to the Middle Ages as the empire of Cathay.
The name of Chin has been supposed (doubtfully) to be derived from the dynasty of Thsin, which a little more than two centuries before our era enjoyed a brief but very vigorous existence, uniting all the Chinese provinces under its authority, and extending its conquests far beyond those limits to the south and the west.
The mention of the Chinas in ancient Sanskrit literature, both in the laws of Manu and in the Mahâbhârat, has often been supposed to prove the application of the name long before the predominance of the Thsin dynasty. But the coupling of that name with the Daradas, still surviving as the people of Dardistan, on the Indus, suggests it as more probable that those Chinas were a kindred race of mountaineers, whose name as Shinas in fact likewise remains applied to a branch of the Dard races. Whether the Sinim of the prophet Isaiah should be interpreted of the Chinese is probably not at present susceptible of any decision; by the context it appears certainly to indicate a people of the extreme east or south.
The name probably came to Europe through the Arabs, who made the China of the further east into Sîn, and perhaps sometimes into Thîn. Hence the Thin of the author of the Periplus, who appears to be the first extant writer to employ the name in this form (i.e., assuming Müller's view that he belongs to the 1st century); hence also the Sinæ and Thinæ of Claudius Ptolemy.
