MARTIANUS MINEUS FELIX, a celebrated writer, who lived somewhere about the close of the fifth century A.D. From his familiar name of Afer Carthaginensis, he appears to have been born at Carthage; but of his life nothing is known with certainty. He is the author of a voluminous allegorical work entitled Satyra de Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercuri, in nine books, which attained a wide celebrity during the middle ages. It is a medley in prose and verse, composed in the bizarre style of Varro's Satyra Mentippae, and Petronius's Satyricon, and probably furnished the model of Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae. The first two books give an account of the nuptials of Mercury with Philology, mentioned in the title, and the remaining seven are devoted to an exposition of the seven liberal sciences, grammar, dialectics, metaphysics and logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and poetry. In the eighth book he makes the remarkable assertion that the earth is not the centre of all the planets, but that Venus and Mercury revolve in common round the sun; and it seems probable that Copernicus, who quotes Capella (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, lib. i., cap. 10), derived from this the first hint of his system. The whole work is one which displays immense learning, and, independently of its African idioms, probably owes much of its barbarous appearance to the frequent erroneous transcriptions which were made by the monks for the use of the mediaeval schools. The best editions are those of Hugo Grotius, 8vo, Leyden, 1599, and U. F. Kopp, 4to, Frankf., 1836.

CAPPELLA, a bright fixed star in the left shoulder of the constellation Auriga.