CENTO, a town of Emilia, Italy, in the province of Ferrara, 18 m. S.E. direct from the town of Ferrara; 50 ft. above sea-level; it is reached by road (6 m. to the W.) from the station of S. Pietro in Casale, 15 m. S.W. by W. of Ferrara, and also by a steam tramway (18 m. N.) from Bologna to Pieve di Cento, on the opposite bank of the Reno. Pop. (1901) 4307 (town), 19,078 (commune). It is connected by a navigable canal with Ferrara. It was the birthplace of the painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino). The communal picture-gallery and several churches contain works by him, but none of first-rate importance. A statue of him stands in front of the 16th century Palazzo Governativo. The town was surrounded by walls, the gates of which are preserved. The origin of the name is uncertain.
CENTO (Gr. κέντρων, Lat. cento, patchwork), a composition made up by collecting passages from various works. The Byzantine Greeks manufactured several out of the poems of Homer, among which may be mentioned the life of Christ by the famous empress Eudoxia, and a version of the Biblical history of Eden and the Fall. The Romans of the later empire and the monks of the middle ages were fond of constructing poems out of the verse of Virgil. Such were the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, the sketch of Biblical history which was compiled in the 4th century by Proba Falconia, wife of a Roman proconsul, and the hymns in honour of St Quirinus taken from Virgil and Horace by Metellus, a monk of Tegernsee, in the latter half of the 12th century. Specimens may be found in the work of Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1504; Frankfort, 1541, 1544). In 1535 Laelius Capitulus produced from Virgil an attack upon the dissolute lives of the monks; in 1536 there appeared at Venice a Petrarca Spirituale; and in 1634 Alexander Ross (a Scotsman, and one of the chaplains of Charles I.) published a Virgilius Evangelizans, seu Historia Domini nostri Jesu Christi Virgilianis verbis et versibus descripta.
CENTRAL AMERICA, that portion of the American continent which lies between Mexico and Colombia, comprising the British crown colony of British Honduras, and the six independent republics of Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. These seven divisions are described in separate articles. Central America is bounded towards the N. by the Caribbean Sea, and towards the S. by the Pacific Ocean, and extends between 7° 12′ and 18° 3′ N. and between 77° 12′ and 92° 17′ W. It has an area of about 208,500 sq. m., and stretches for some 1300 m. from N.W. to S.E., in a succession of three serpentine curves, reaching its greatest breadth, 450 m., between the Peninsula of Nicoya and the north coast of Honduras, and diminishing to 35 m. in the Isthmus of Panama. The eastern boundary of Central America was usually regarded as identical with that of Costa Rica until 1903, when the republic of Panama was formed out of the northern territories of Colombia; and the more modern definition given above does not command the universal assent of geographers, because it fails to include the whole region up to the natural frontier on the north-west, i.e. the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. It has, however, the support of political and historical considerations, as well as of common usage; and it may therefore be regarded as adequate, although, in respect of climate and natural products, it would be more accurate to define Central America as lying between Tehuantepec and Darien.
Physical Features.—The Cordilleras, or mountain chains of Central America do not form a complete link between the western ranges in the north and south of the continent, for their continuity is interrupted by various depressions, of which the chief is the lacustrine basin of Nicaragua. With these exceptions, they traverse Central America from end to end, their main axis trending from north-west to south-east. They do not, as a rule, rise in sharply serrated ridges or series of volcanic crests, like the Andes, but the central Cordilleras are disposed in a succession of mountain masses, with many lesser chains radiating from them. The principal summits have an altitude of 12,000 and even, in a few cases, of 13,000 ft., and the general character of the ranges is volcanic, many craters being still active. Large tracts of land remained imperfectly surveyed at the beginning of the 20th century, owing to the unhealthiness of the tropical climate, and the dense underwoods which impede exploration. In the northern part of Guatemala, on the Pacific coast of the same country, in British Honduras, along the Segovia river, on the Mosquito Coast, and in the basin of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan river, there are broad stretches of comparatively flat country. The main line of watershed is everywhere nearer to the Pacific than to the Atlantic, except in southern Costa Rica and Panama, where it is almost equidistant from the two oceans. In consequence, the rivers of the Pacific seaboard are mostly short and swift,—mere mountain torrents, in many instances, until they reach the sands and swamps which border the sea. The rivers of the Atlantic littoral descend more gradually, and by longer channels. The largest of them is the Segovia, in Nicaragua and Honduras, which has a course of 450 m. Lake Nicaragua, the largest inland sheet of water, has an area exceeding 3500 sq. m. There are also several mountain lakes of exceptional interest and beauty, such as Atitlán and Amatitlán, in Guatemala, besides two great land-locked salt-water lakes—the Pearl Lagoon of the Mosquito Coast, and the Carataska Lagoon in Honduras.
Geology.—The neck of land which unites the continents of North and South America is not, geologically, the direct continuation of either, but constitutes a third element which is wedged, as it were, between the other two. The folds in the earth’s crust which form the Andes and the Western ranges of North America, are not continued along the connecting isthmus, where, on the contrary, the strata are folded from west to east, obliquely across the trend of the continent. It should, however, be noticed that the Andes, as they approach the Caribbean sea, bend round towards the east; and it is probable that the folds of the North American Cordillera similarly bend eastward beneath the volcanic rocks of Mexico. The folds of Central America are tangential to the two arcs thus formed.