[23] Lehmann, De Ciceronis ad Atticum epp. recensendis, p. 128.

[24] Philologus, 1901, p. 216.

[25] Anecdota Oxoniensia, Classical Series, part ix. (W. Petersen).

[26] Anecdota Oxoniensia, Classical Series, part x. (A.C. Clark).


CICERONE, a guide, one who conducts visitors to museums, galleries, &c, and explains matters of archaeological, antiquarian, historic or artistic interest. The word is presumably taken from Marcus Tullius Cicero, as a type of learning and eloquence. The New English Dictionary finds examples of the use earlier in English than Italian, the earliest quotation being from Addison’s Dialogues on Medals (published posthumously 1726). It appears that the word was first applied to “learned antiquarians who show and explain to foreigners the antiquities and curiosities of the country” (quotation of 1762 in the New English Dictionary).


CICHLID (Cichlidae), a family of Acanthopterygian fishes, related to the perches and wrasses, and confined to the fresh and brackish waters of Central and South America, Africa, Syria, and India and Ceylon. It has recently assumed special importance through the large number of genera and species, many of them showing extraordinary modifications of the dentition, which have been discovered in tropical Africa, especially in the great lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa. About 180 species are known from Africa (with Syria and Madagascar), 150 from America, and 3 from India and Ceylon. They were formerly known under the inappropriate name of Chromides.

These fish are further remarkable for their nursing habits. It was formerly believed that the male takes charge of the eggs, and later the young, by sheltering them in the mouth and pharynx. This may still be true of some of the American species, but a long series of recent observations have shown that this most efficacious parental care devolves invariably on the female in the African and Syrian species. We are now acquainted with a large number of species in which this extraordinary habit has been observed, the number having lately been greatly increased by the collections made in Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria.

L. Lortet had described a fish from Lake Tiberias in which he believed he had observed the male take up the eggs after their deposition and retain them in his mouth and pharynx long after eclosion, in fact until the young are able to shift for themselves, and this fish he named Chromis paterfamilias. A. Günther had also ascribed the same sex to a fish from Natal, Chromis philander, observed by N. Abraham to have similar habits. G.A. Boulenger has since had an opportunity to examine the latter specimen and found it to be a female, as in all other nursing individuals from various parts of Africa, previously observed by himself; whilst J. Pellegrin has acertained the female sex of a specimen with eggs in the mouth presented to the Paris museum by Lortet as his Chromis paterfamilias (= Tilapia simonis). Further observations by Pellegrin on Tilapia galilaea and Pelmatochromis lateralis, by E. Schoeller on Paralilapia multicolor, have led to the same result.