See for authorities Commentaries on the Law of Private Corporations, by Seymour D. Thompson, LL.D., 6 vols.; Beach on Corporations, and the American Encyclopaedia of Law.
(E. Ma.)
COMPARATIVE ANATOMY, a term employed to designate the study of the structure of man as compared with that of lower animals, and sometimes the study of lower animals in contra-distinction to human anatomy; the term is now falling into desuetude, and lingers practically only in the titles of books or in the designation of university chairs. The change in terminology is chiefly the result of modern conceptions of zoology. From the point of view of structure, man is one of the animals; all investigations into anatomical structure must be comparative, and in this work the subject is so treated throughout. See [Anatomy] and [Zoology].
COMPARETTI, DOMENICO (1835- ), Italian scholar, was born at Rome on the 27th of June 1835. He studied at the university of Rome, took his degree in 1855 in natural science and mathematics, and entered his uncle’s pharmacy as assistant. His scanty leisure was, however, given to study. He learned Greek by himself, and gained facility in the modern language by conversing with the Greek students at the university. In spite of all disadvantages, he not only mastered the language, but became one of the chief classical scholars of Italy. In 1857 he published, in the Rheinisches Museum, a translation of some recently discovered fragments of Hypereides, with a dissertation on that orator. This was followed by a notice of the annalist Granius Licinianus, and one on the oration of Hypereides on the Lamian War. In 1859 he was appointed professor of Greek at Pisa on the recommendation of the duke of Sermoneta. A few years later he was called to a similar post at Florence, remaining emeritus professor at Pisa also. He subsequently took up his residence in Rome as lecturer on Greek antiquities and greatly interested himself in the Forum excavations. He was a member of the governing bodies of the academies of Milan, Venice, Naples and Turin. The list of his writings is long and varied. Of his works in classical literature, the best known are an edition of the Euxenippus of Hypereides, and monographs on Pindar and Sappho. He also edited the great inscription which contains a collection of the municipal laws of Gortyn in Crete, discovered on the site of the ancient city. In the Kalewala and the Traditional Poetry of the Finns (English translation by I. M. Anderton, 1898) he discusses the national epic of Finland and its heroic songs, with a view to solving the problem whether an epic could be composed by the interweaving of such national songs. He comes to a negative conclusion, and applies this reasoning to the Homeric problem. He treats this question again in a treatise on the so-called Peisistratean edition of Homer (La Commissione omerica di Pisistrato, 1881). His Researches concerning the Book of Sindibād have been translated in the Proceedings of the Folk-Lore Society. His Vergil in the Middle Ages (translated into English by E. F. Benecke, 1895) traces the strange vicissitudes by which the great Augustan poet became successively grammatical fetich, Christian prophet and wizard. Together with Professor Alessandro d’Ancona, Comparetti edited a collection of Italian national songs and stories (9 vols., Turin, 1870-1891), many of which had been collected and written down by himself for the first time.
COMPASS (Fr. compas, ultimately from Lat. cum, with, and passus, step), a term of which the evolution of the various meanings is obscure; the general sense is “measure” or “measurement,” and the word is used thus in various derived meanings—area, boundary, circuit. It is also more particularly applied to a mathematical instrument (“pair of compasses”) for measuring or for describing a circle, and to the mariner’s compass.
| Fig. 1.—Compass Card. |
The mariner’s compass, with which this article is concerned, is an instrument by means of which the directive force of that great magnet, the Earth, upon a freely-suspended needle, is utilized for a purpose essential to navigation. The needle is so mounted that it only moves freely in the horizontal plane, and therefore the horizontal component of the earth’s force alone directs it. The direction assumed by the needle is not generally towards the geographical north, but diverges towards the east or west of it, making a horizontal angle with the true meridian, called the magnetic variation or declination; amongst mariners this angle is known as the variation of the compass. In the usual navigable waters of the world the variation alters from 30° to the east to 45° to the west of the geographical meridian, being westerly in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, easterly in the Pacific. The vertical plane passing through the longitudinal axis of such a needle is known as the magnetic meridian. Following the first chart of lines of equal variation compiled by Edmund Halley in 1700, charts of similar type have been published from time to time embodying recent observations and corrected for the secular change, thus providing seamen with values of the variation accurate to about 30’ of arc. Possessing these data, it is easy to ascertain by observation the effects of the iron in a ship in disturbing the compass, and it will be found for the most part in every vessel that the needle is deflected from the magnetic meridian by a horizontal angle called the deviation of the compass; in some directions of the ship’s head adding to the known variation of the place, in other directions subtracting from it. Local magnetic disturbance of the needle due to magnetic rocks is observed on land in all parts of the world, and in certain places extends to the land under the sea, affecting the compasses on board the ships passing over it. The general direction of these disturbances in the northern hemisphere is an attraction of the north-seeking end of the needle; in the southern hemisphere, its repulsion. The approaches to Cossack, North Australia; Cape St Francis, Labrador; the coasts of Madagascar and Iceland, are remarkable for such disturbance of the compass.