CANNON-BALL TREE (Couroupita guianensis), a native of tropical South America (French Guiana), which bears large spherical woody fruits, containing numerous seeds, as in the allied genus Bertholletia (Brazil nut).
CANNSTATT, or Kannstatt, a town of Germany in the kingdom of Württemberg, pleasantly situated in a fertile valley on both banks of the Neckar, 2½ m. from Stuttgart, with which it has been incorporated since 1904. Pop. (1905) 26,497. It is a railway centre, has two Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, two bridges across the Neckar, handsome streets in the modern quarter of the town and fine promenades and gardens. There is a good deal of business in the town. Railway plant, automobiles and machinery are manufactured; spinning and weaving are carried on; and there are chemical works and a brewery here. Fruit and vines are largely cultivated in the neighbourhood. A large population is temporarily attracted to Cannstatt by the fame of its mineral springs, which are valuable for diseases of the throat and weaknesses of the nervous system. These springs were known to the Romans. Besides the usual bathing establishments there are several medical institutions for the treatment of disease. Near the town are the palaces of Rosenstein and Wilhelma; the latter, built (1842-1851) for King William of Württemberg in the Moorish style, is surrounded by beautiful gardens. In the neighbourhood also are immense caves in the limestone where numerous bones of mammoths and other extinct animals have been found. On the Rotenberg, where formerly stood the ancestral castle of the house of Württemberg, is the mausoleum of King William and his wife.
Cannstatt (Condistat) is mentioned early in the 8th century as the place where a great court was held by Charlemagne for the trial of the rebellious dukes of the Alamanni and the Bavarians. From the emperor Louis the Bavarian it received the same rights and privileges as were enjoyed by the town of Esslingen, and until the middle of the 14th century it was the capital of the county of Württemberg. Cannstatt was the scene of a victory gained by the French over the Austrians on the 21st of July 1796.
See Veiel, Der Kurort Kannstatt und seine Mineralquellen (Cannstatt, 1875).
CANO, ALONZO (1601-1667), Spanish painter, architect and sculptor, was born at Granada. He has left in Spain a very great number of specimens of his genius, which display the boldness of his design, the facility of his pencil, the purity of his flesh-tints and his knowledge of chiaroscuro. He learned architecture from his father, Miguel Cano, painting from Pacheco and sculpture from Juan Martinez Montañes. As a statuary, his most famous works are the Madonna and Child in the church of Nebrissa, and the colossal figures of San Pedro and San Pablo. As an architect he indulged in too profuse ornamentation, and gave way too much to the fancies of his day. Philip IV. made him royal architect and king’s painter, and gave him the church preferment of a canon. His more important pictures are at Madrid. He was notorious for his ungovernable temper; and it is said that once he risked his life by committing the then capital offence of dashing to pieces the statue of a saint, when in a rage with the purchaser who grudged the price he demanded. His known passionateness also (according to another story) caused him to be suspected, and even tortured, for the murder of his wife, though all other circumstances pointed to his servant as the culprit.
CANO, MELCHIOR (1325-1560), Spanish theologian, born at Tarançon, in New Castile, joined the Dominican order at an early age at Salamanca, where in 1546 he succeeded to the theological chair in that university. A man of deep learning and originality, proud and a victim to the odium theologicum, he could brook no rivalry. The only one who at that time could compare with him was the gentle Bartolomeo de Caranza, also a Dominican and afterwards archbishop of Toledo. At the university the schools were divided between the partisans of the two professors; but Cano pursued his rival with relentless virulence, and took part in the condemnation for heresy of his brother-friar. The new society of the Jesuits, as being the forerunners of Antichrist, also met with his violent opposition; and he was not grateful to them when, after attending the council of Trent in 1545, he was sent, by their influence, in 1552, as bishop of the far-off see of the Canaries. His personal influence with Philip II. soon procured his recall, and he was made provincial of his order in Castile. In 1556 he wrote his famous Consultatio theologica, in which he advised the king to resist the temporal encroachments of the papacy and, as absolute monarch, to defend his rights by bringing about a radical change in the administration of ecclesiastical revenues, thus making Spain less dependent on Rome. With this in his mind Paul IV. styled him “a son of perdition.” The reputation of Cano, however, rests on a posthumous work, De Locis theologicis (Salamanca, 1562), which stands to-day unrivalled in its own line. In this, a genuine work of the Renaissance, Cano endeavours to free dogmatic theology from the vain subtleties of the schools and, by clearing away the puerilities of the later scholastic theologians, to bring religion back to first principles; and, by giving rules, method, co-ordination and system, to build up a scientific treatment of theology. He died at Toledo on the 30th of September 1560.