CAN'TONMENTS (Fr. containment, from container, to quarter, from canton, quarter), MILITARY. A more or less permanent camp or district, in which soldiers are quartered. In Europe, before the era of railroads and modern scientific warfare and transport, there would be frequently long intervals between active opera tions, caused principally by the state of the weather, winter, etc.; impassable roads; local or general armistices; and the constantly recurring necessity of waiting for supplies. In such inter vals the troops would go either into a permanent camp of huts, or else he quartered in the houses and villages of the district, when they were said to be in cantonments. Its most modern military usage is in India. where the cantonment is prac tically a military town, and, in the majority of instances the district inside whose borders live the European part of the population. civil as well as military. Cantonments are built through out British India, the larger examples containing barracks for European cavalry, infantry, and artillery; rows of bungalows or houses. each, as a rule. inclosed in a garden, for the officers; rows of huts for the native troops: magazines. gymnasiums. and parade grounds; public offices and administration buildings; and a bazaar, more particularly for the accommodation of the native troops.
CANTU, 16rt-tt.', CESARE (1804-95). A dis
tinguished Italian historian and novelist, born at Brivio, near Milan, December 5, 1SO4. He was educated at Sondrio, where, at an early age. he became instructor in belles-lettres, leaving after four years, to accept a professorship, first in Como, and later in Milan. The liberal tendencies expressed in a work published in 1832. Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century: An Historical Com mentary on the "Promessi Sposi" of Man::oni, re sulted in an imprisonment of thirteen months. Canth spent his enforced leisure in describing the sorrows of prison life in the form of a widely read historical romance, Margherita Pusterla (1837). His great work is the Storia unirersale, in 35 vols. (Turin, 1837, sq.), based largely upon French and German sources, but uniformly col ored with a strong clerical bias. Next in impor tance is his History of the Italians, in six volmues (Turin, 1854), and the following also deserve mention: History of Italian Literature (1865) ; Independence of Italy (1572) ; Milan: A History of the People for the People (1871) ; and many monographs upon Parini, Beccaria, :Monti, and other men of letters. Canto became director of the archives of Lombardy in 1874. lle died in Milan, March 11, 1895. Consult Bertolini, Cesare Conti( e le sue opere (Florence, 1895).