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LEFT CUMULATIVE VOTING 221 CUNEIFORM WRITING port from Taft. He is an acknowledged authority on the railroads and wrote the ALBERT BAIRD CUMMINS main provisions of the Cummins-Esch Railroad Act of 1920. CUMULATIVE VOTING, a system of voting at elections by which the voter is allowed to cast as many votes as there are candidates for a given office, dis- tributing his votes or giving all of them to a single candidate. It is claimed that the proportional result is a more faithful reflex of the will of a community than the majority method. CUNARD, SIR SAMUEL, founder of an English steamship line; born in Hali- fax, Nova Scotia, where his father, a Philadelphia merchant, had settled, Nov. 21, 1787. Becoming early a successful merchant and shipowner, he went to England in 1838, joined with George Burns, Glasgow, and David M'lver, Liver- pool, in founding (1839) the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, and obtained a contract from the British Government for the mail service between Liverpool and Hali- fax, Boston, and Quebec. The first pas- sage was that of the "Britannia" in 1840, the time occupied being 14 days 8 hours. Iron steamers were first used in 1855, and paddle-wheels gave way entirely to the screw after 1862. From its small but successful beginning, Cunard's undertak- ing soon developed into one of the vaptest of private commercial concerns. In 1878 it was made into a joint stock company. Created a baronet in 1859, he died in London, April 28, 1865. CUNEIFORM WRITING, the name applied to the wedge-shaped characters of tha inscriptions on old Babylonian and Persian monuments; sometimes also de- scribed as "arrow-headed" or "nail- headed" characters. They appear to have been originally of the nature of hiero- glyphs, and to have been invented by the primitive Akkadian inhabitants of Chal- dea, from whom they were borrowed with considerable modification by the conquer- ing Babylonians and Assyrians, who were Semites by race and spoke an entirely different language. Cuneiform inscrip- tions were chiseled upon stone and iron, but they were impressed upon soft clay with a pointed stylus having three un- equal facets, the smallest to make the fine wedge of the cuneiform signs, the middle to make the thicker wedges, and the largest to make the outer and thick wedges of the characters. The first date that can be assigned to the use of cunei- form writing is about 3800 B. c, and its use was continued until after the birth of Christ. The earliest inscription at pres- ent known is that inscribed upon the porphyry whorl in the time of Sargon of Agade ; the latest is a tablet perserved at Munich, which may have been written about A. D. 83. The ruins found all over ancient Persep- olis attracted the attention of Eastern travelers, yet no one believed that those strange wedges which completely covered some of them could have any meaning. It was Garcia de Sylva Figueroa, am- bassador of Philip III. of Spain, who, on a visit to Persepolis in 1618, first thought that these sigris must be inscrip- tions in some lost wi'iting. Among sub- sequent travelers whose attention was at- tracted to the subject, was Chardin, who after his return to Europe in 1674, pub- lished three complete groups of cunei- forms, copied by himself at Persepolis. He likewise declared it to be "writing and no hieroglyphs; the rest, however, will always be unknown." Michaux, a French botanist, sent to Paris, in 1782, a boundary stone covered with inscriptions, which he found at Bagdad. Niebuhr, without attempting to read the character itself, first established three distinct cuneiform alphabets in- stead of one, the letters of which seemed to outnumber those of all other languages 15— Vol. Ill— Cyc