CESALPINO, cha-zal-peno, or C/BSAL PIN, Andrea, Italian botanist and physiolo gist: b. Arezzo, Tuscany, 1519; d. Rome, 23 Feb. 1603. He studied and taught medicine and botany at the University of Pisa, and was physician to Pope Clement VIII. He was the author of a valuable work 'On in which he classified plants by their parts of fructifica tion. To this work Linnaeus, Jussieu and other subsequent botanists were greatly indebted for their ideas of botanical classification. In his 'Peripatetic Investigations' he propounded the theory of the circulation of the blood, after ward adopted and demonstrated by Harvey.
CgSAR BIROTTEAU, hi-ro'to (1837), is perhaps the most notable in a noteworthy group of scenes in Balzac's 'Human Comedy' dealing with business venture and the chicanery of unscrupulous finance, with the cumulative en tanglements of debt and the legal snares of usurious oppression. In this novel these are viewed from the point of view of a prosperous tradesman, with chivalrous standards of com mercial honor, whom success in his own field betrays into ventures in unfamiliar regions where he falls among thieves, men whom he thought he had special reason to trust. It is, Balzac says in his preface, "the obverse of a medal whose reverse is La Maison Nucingen,° which deals, somewhat less genially, with the same theme from the side of the exploiters of men'of too credulous probity. Cesar, a brother of Balzac's memorably unfortunate Cure de Tours, had prospered as a manufacturing per fumer during the consulate and the empire, though his relations to militant royalists had brought him a wound in connection with the conspiracy of Vendemiaire, 1795, which seemed to give him a title to the aid of royalist sympa thizers after the Restoration. One of these was
the very unscrupulous and successful Baron Nucingen. Du Tillet, once Birotteau's head clerk and a betrayer of both his domestic and his mercantile confidence, but now a financial shark and confederate of Nucingen for his baser needs, interests Birotteau, at a moment when his ambition reaches full bloom in a nomination as chevalier of the Legion of Honor, in a speculation and in imprudent ex penditure by which his wealth becomes theirs and he a bankrupt debtor. By heroic exertion, four years' persistent labor and scrupulous economy, aided by Popinot, another type of industrial honor, who was later to marry Birotteau's worthy and charming daughter Cesarine, the debtor discharges his liabilities to the last farthing, dying from the relaxing of the strain immediately after his solemn re habilitation and the restoration of his commer cial honor and coveted decoration by the courts. The story is less to be commended as a whole than for its portrayals of character, especially of the two druggists, the generous and loyal Popinot and the smug materialist Matifat, of the gentleman-scoundrel Du Tillet and the in gracious Cesarine, and most of all for its minute pictures, drawn it may well be from Balzac's own frequent memories, of the mental and moral tortures of Cesar in his cumulating commercial embarrassments. There are four English translations.