CUNARD, Sir Samuel (1787-1865), baronet,· civil engineer, founder of the Cunard line of Atlantic steam-ships, was born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1787. He was the son of a merchant, and was himself trained for the pursuits of commerce, in which, by his abilities and enterprizing spirit, he attained a conspicuous position. When, in the early years of steam navigation, the English Government made known its desire to substitute steam vessels for the sailing ships then employed in the mail service between England and America, Canard heartily entered into the scheme, came to England, and accepted the Government tender for carrying it out. A company was formed, the members of which were Canard, Messrs Burns of Glasgow, and Messrs Maclver of Liverpool, these two firms being then proprietors of rival lines of coasting steamers between Glasgow and Liverpool. For the first contract with the Government four steam-vessels were built, and the first voyage was successfully made by the “Britannia” from Liverpool to Boston, U.S., between July 4 and 19, 1840. Such was the small beginning of an undertaking which in the course of thirty-seven years has grown into one of the vastest of private enterprizes, and may even rank in importance, as to the extent of interests involved in it, and the number of hands employed, with railway and other public companies. In 1852 the company began to substitute iron screw steamers for the wooden vessels with paddlewheels in use up to that time. The Cunard fleet has always borne the highest character for the build, manning, management, and provisioning of the ships; and the reward of the scrupulous care exercised has been a rare immunity from what are called “casualties.” In acknowledgment of his energetic and successful services Cunard was, in ...1859, created a baronet. He died in London, April 28, 1865.
CUNEIFORM WRITING. The cuneiform or « wedge-shaped” system of writing takes its name from the wedgelike form of its characters, which were once extensively used over Western Asia. It has sometimes been called “arrow-headed” from the supposed resemblance of the several strokes which compose a character to the head of an arrow. The characters were originally hieroglyphics, each denoting an object or idea, and, like the Chinese, were gradually corrupted into the forms we see on the Assyrian monuments. They were invented by the primitive Accadian population of Chaldea, who spoke an agglutinative language, and were borrowed from them by their Semitic conquerors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. The characters had come to be used phonetically as well as ideographically even in Accadian times; but they were not redacted into a systematic syllabary until the Semites changed the Accadian words they represented into as many phonetic values. The abundance of clay in Babylonia caused this material to be largely employed for writing purposes, and the impress of the metal style upon it gave the characters their wedge-like appearance. The Semites carried the new syllabary with them into Assyria, and, as in Babylonia, continued to employ it both as a syllabary and as a collection of ideographs; that is to say, a character might not only denote a mere unmeaning syllable, but an idea as well. As each character had answered to several different Accadian words, the Assyrian syllabary by changing these words into phonetic values became necessarily polyphonous. In the 9th century b.c. the Alarodian tribes of Armenia borrowed a selected number of characters and ideographs from the Assyrian syllabary, giving to each character one value only. At a subsequent date the “Turanian” ...population of Media and northern Susiania did the same, producing the syllabary of the Protomedic transcripts which accompany the Persian and Babylonian inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings. The Persian cuneiform alphabet of 40 characters was itself taken from the same source under the reign of Darius; the meaning of each character, when used as an ideograph, being expressed in Persian, and the initial letter of the Persian word being then assigned to it as a value. The cuneiform system of writing had been in use in southern Susiania in very early times, and accordingly the forms of the. characters employed there agree with those found in the oldest Chaldean inscriptions. Indeed it is probable that it was invented by the Accadians before they had descended into Babylonia from the mountains of Elam, about 3000 b.c. As employed in Babylonia and Assyria, the cuneiform writing tended to become more and more simplified, unnecessary wedges being discarded, and we may therefore divide it into Archaic, Hieratic, Assyrian, and Later Babylonian. See Inscriptions.
CUNITZ, Maria, a celebrated astronomer, born about the beginning of the 17th century, was the eldest daughter of a doctor of medicine in Silesia, and the wife of a Dutch physician, Elias de Loewen, whom she married in 1630. She is said to have understood Polish, German, French. Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and to have had an extraordinary general culture, but her principal study was mathematics and astronomy. Her tables, published under the title Urania Propitia, sive Tabulae Astronomica?, which gained for her a great reputation, were composed in a Polish convent, where, with her husband, she had taken refuge at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. They were printed in Latin and German (Gels, 1650, and Frankfort, 1651), and dedicated to the Emperor Ferdinand III.
