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 CURTIUS RUFUS GUSHING 589 CURTIUS RUFFS, Quint us, a Eoman historian, according to some critics contemporary with Vespasian, according to others with Constan- tino. His history, entitled De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Hagni, consisted originally of ten books, but the first two have perished, and the eight that remain are by no means perfect. It is written in a pleasing though inflated style, and is not a good historical authority. The best edition is that of Zumpt (Berlin, 1849). CURVE, or Curved Line, in geometry, a line which continually and continuously changes its direction. In the higher geometry, a curve is a line in which the coordinates of each point fulfil the same laws. (See ANALYTICAL GEOME- TEY.) The circumference of a circle is the simplest of all curves. It is taken as the mea- sure of curvature. The circle which would exactly fit any curve at any point is called the circle of curvature or osculatory circle at that point, and its radius, the radius of curvature. A law by which this radius increases and diminishes in going to different points is usually considered the most vital law of the curve. CURZOLA, an island of Dalmatia, Austria, in the Adriatic, S. of Lesina, and separated from the mainland by a narrow strait; pop. 11,100. The capital, Ourzola, has a Catholic high school; pop. 2,300. Near Curzola the Genoese under Doria, on Sept. 8, 1298, gained a great naval victory over the Venetians under Dandolo. CURZON, Paul Alfred de, a French painter, born near Poitiers, Sept. 7, 1820. He excels chiefly in landscape painting, has explored the Morea in company with Edmond About and Charles Gamier, and has executed many good pictures, especially those of the Acropolis of Athens and the shores of the Cephissus, which were favora- bly noticed at the universal exhibition in Pa- ris in 1855. He also received a second medal in 1857, and a third at the exhibition in 1867. CUSII, the name of the eldest son of Ham, as well as of a southern region of the Scriptural world, which is rendered Ethiopia by the Sep- tuagint, the Vulgate, and almost all other ver- sions of the Hebrew Bible, and Mohrenland, or land of the blacks, by Luther. There can be no rational doubt that Ethiopia, in its more common and limited sense, was designated by that appellation in Hebrew, though Bochart has contended for its meaning exclusively south- ern Arabia. Ezekiel (xxix. 10) speaks of it as lying beyond Syene, which perfectly agrees with the classical definition of the boundaries of Ethiopia. Mizraim (Egypt) and Cush are often connected by the prophets, and men- tioned together in the Psalms (Ixviii. 31). The Cushites appear together with other African nations in historical relations ; their black com- plexion is alluded to in the Bible as well as in the Mishnah. But whether Cush included any other region in the world known to the He- brews, especially southern Arabia, is a question which has elicited a great deal of ethnological controversy. Michaelis and other critics de- fend the affirmative; Gesenius maintains the negative. The former opinion is strengthened by a number of Scriptural passages in which Cush appears together with Arabian tribes, by its being rendered Arabia in the Chaldee para- phrase of Jonathan, and by the existence of a tribe called Beni Khusi in Yemen, according to Niebuhr. We find, besides, the land of Cush compassed by the river Gihon (Gen. ii. 13), and Cush the father of Nimrod, who founded empires in Asia. The same name is connect- ed by Ezekiel with Elam or Susiana, which again agrees with the classical names of Cissi- ans and Cossaeans given to the inhabitants of the latter country, and with its modern name, Khusistan. The Himyarites, an ancient peo- ple of southern Arabia, are styled by Syrian writers both Cushaeans and Ethiopians. The classical term Ethiopia, too, comprised many distant and distinct nations, having in common only their sun-burnt complexion. Homer calls them " a divided race, the last of men, some of them at the extreme west, and others at the extreme east." Strabo says nearly the same. Herodotus speaks of an eastern or Asiatic, and a western or African Ethiopia. The prevalent opinion of the latest ethnological and Biblical scholars is, therefore, that Cush in its limited meaning designates Ethiopia, but is also the name of several Asiatic regions situated along the shores of the southern ocean, and inhabited by people of the Hamitic family. "Recent linguistic discovery," says George Rawlinson ("Herodotus," book i., essay xi.), "tends to show that a Cushite or Ethiopian race did in the earliest times extend itself along the shores of the southern ocean from Abyssinia to India. The whole peninsula of India was peopled by a race of this character, before the influx of the Aryans ; it extended from the Indus along the seacoast through the modern Beloochistan and Kerman, which was the proper country of the Asiatic Ethiopians ; the cities on the north- ern shores of the Persian gulf are shown by the brick inscriptions found among their ruins to have belonged to this race ; it was dominant in Susiana and Babylonia, until overpowered in the one country by Aryan, in the other by Semitic intrusion; it can be traced, both by dialect and tradition, throughout the whole south coast of the Arabian peninsula ; and it still exists in Abyssinia." The early power and culture of the Cushite race, in the widest sense of this term, are the principal theme of J. D. Baldwin's "Prehistoric Nations" (New York, 1869). CUSHING, Caleb, an American jurist and statesman, born in Salisbury, Essex co., Mass., Jan. 17, 1800. At the age of 17 he graduated at Harvard college, and for nearly two years subsequent was tutor of mathematics and nat- ural philosophy in that institution. He was admitted to the bar and commenced practice at Nevvburyport in 1825. Although he at- tained high professional success, he continued to give a part of his attention to literary stud- ies, and became a prominent contributor to