an inland county of England, bounded on the east by Norfolk and Suffolk, on the south by Essex and Hertfordshire, on the west by Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, and on the north by Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire. Prior to the arrival of the Romans it was included in the ancient division of the Iceni; and New Cambridge, after their conquest, in the third province of Flavia Caesariensis, which reached from the Thames to the Humber. During the Heptarchy it belonged to the kingdom of the East Angles, the fifth kingdom, which began in 575, and ended in 792, having had 14 kings; and it is now included in the Norfolk circuit, the diocese of Ely, and province of Canterbury, except a small part which is in the diocese of Norwich. It is about 40 miles in length from north to south, and 25 in breadth from east to west, and is 130 miles in circumference, containing near 570,000 acres. It has about 17,400 houses, 140,000 inhabitants; is divided into 17 hundreds, in which are one city, Ely; 8 market towns, viz. Cambridge, which is the shire town, and a celebrated university, Caxton, Linton, Merch, Newmarket, Soham, Wisbech, Thorney, and part of Royton; 220 villages, 64 parishes: sends 2 members to parliament (exclusive of 2 for the town, and 2 for the university), pays one part of the land tax, and provides 480 men in the militia. Its only rivers are the Cam, the Nene, and the Ouse. A considerable tract of land in this county is distinguished by the name of the Isle of Ely. It consists of fenny ground, divided by innumerable channels and drains: and is part of a very spacious level, containing 300,000 acres of land, extending into Norfolk, Suffolk, Huntingdonshire, and Lincolnshire. The Isle of Ely is the north division of the county, and extends south almost as far as Cambridge. The whole level of which this is part, is bounded on one side by the sea, and on the others by uplands; which taken together, form a rude kind of fen-micircle, resembling a horse shoe. The air is very different in different parts of the country. In the fens it is moist and foggy, and therefore not so wholesome; but in the south and east parts it is very good, these being much drier than the other: but both, by late improvements, have been rendered very fruitful, the former by draining, and the latter by cinquefoil: so that it produces plenty of corn, especially barley, saffron, and hemp, and affords the richest pastures. The rivers abound with fish, and the fens with wild fowl. The principal manufactures of the county are malt, paper, and baskets. As the above tract appears to have been dry land formerly, the great change it has undergone must have been owing either to a violent breach and inundation of the sea, or to earthquakes. As the towns in and about the fens were great sufferers by the stagnation of the waters in summer, and want of provisions in winter, many attempts were made to drain them, but without success, until the time of Charles I., in which, and that of his son, the work was happily completed, and an act of parliament passed, by which a corporation was established for its preservation and government. By the same act, 83,000 acres were vested in the corporation, and 10,000 in the king. In these fens are a great many decoys, in which incredible numbers of ducks, and other wild fowl, are caught during the season. The population of the county of Cambridge, as it was taken in 1801, amounted to 89,349 persons.

New CAMBRIDGE, a town of New England, about three New Cambridge three miles from Boston, remarkable for an university consisting of three colleges. W. Long. 70.4. N. Lat. 42.0.

Cambridge Manuscript, a copy of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin. Beza found it in the monastery of Irenaeus at Lyons in the year 1562, and gave it to the university of Cambridge in 1582. It is a quarto size, and written on vellum; 66 leaves of it are much torn and mutilated, ten of which are supplied by a later transcriber. Beza conjectures, that this manuscript might have existed so early as the time of Irenaeus: Wetstein apprehends that it either returned or was first brought from Egypt into France; that it is the same copy which Druthmar, an ancient expositor who lived about the year 840, had seen, and which, he observes, was ascribed to St Hilary; and that R. Stephens had given a particular account of it in his edition of the New Testament in 1550. It is usually called Stephens's second Manuscript. Mill agrees with F. Simon in opinion, that it was written in the western part of the world by a Latin scribe, and that it is to a great degree interpolated and corrupted: he observes that it agrees so much with the Latin Vulgate, as to afford reason for concluding, that it was corrected or formed upon a corrupt and faulty copy of that translation. From this and the Clermont copy of St Paul's Epistles, Beza published his larger Annotations in 1582.

CAMBYSÉS. See (History of) Persia.