ture, in order
to secure the greatest brilliancy of light.

COMILLA, or KUMILLA, a town of British India, headquarters of Tippera
district in Eastern Bengal and Assam, situated on the river Gumti, with
a station on the Assam-Bengal railway, 96 m. from the coast terminus at
Chittagong. Pop. (1901) 19,169. The town has many large tanks and an
English church, built in 1875.

COMINES, or COMMINES (Flem. _Komen_), a town of western Flanders, 13 m.
N.N.W. of Lille by rail. It is divided by the river Lys, leaving one
part on French (department of Nord), the other on Belgian territory
(province of West Flanders). Pop. of the French town 6359 (1906); of the
Belgian town, 6453 (1904). The former has a belfry of the 14th century,
restored in the 17th and 19th centuries, and remains of a chateau.
Comines carries on the spinning of flax, wool and cotton.

COMITIA, the name applied, always in technical and generally in popular
phraseology, to the most formal types of gathering of the sovereign
people in ancient Rome. It is the plural of _comitium_, the old
"meeting-place" (Lat. _cum_, together, _ire_, to go) on the north-west
of the Forum. The Romans had three words for describing gatherings of
the people. These were _concilium_, _comitia_ and _contio_. Of these
concilium had the most general significance. It could be applied to any
kind of meeting and is often used to describe assemblies in foreign
states. It was, therefore, a word that might be employed to denote an
organized gathering of a portion of the Roman people such as the plebs,
and in this sense is contrasted with _comitia_, which when used strictly
should signify an assembly of the whole people. Thus the Roman
draughtsman who wishes to express the idea "magistrates of any kind as
president of assemblies" writes "Magistratus queiquomque comitia
conciliumve habebit" (_Lex Latina tabulae Bantinae_, l. 5), and
formalism required that a magistrate who summoned only a portion of the
people to meet him should, in his summons, use the word _concilium_.
This view is expressed by Laelius Felix, a lawyer probably of the age of
Hadrian, when he writes "Is qui non universum populum, sed partem
aliquam adesse jubet, non comitia, sed concilium edicere debet"
(Gellius, _Noctes Atticae_, xv. 27). But popular phraseology did not
conform to this canon, and _comitia_, which gained in current Latin the
sense of "elections" was sometimes used of the assemblies of the plebs