258 



CIOTAT 



CIRCLE 



Convention signed here, August 22, 1808, between 

 the English and French, by which the latter agreed 

 to evacuate Portugal, on condition of not being 

 treated as prisoners of war, but landed on the 

 coast of France, retaining their arms and effects. 

 This convention excited the greatest public indig- 

 nation both in the Peninsula and in England ; 

 and the British ministry were obliged to have the 

 generals who signed the convention tried by a 

 court-martial, which, however, resulted in their 

 acquittal. 



Ciotilt. LA, a town in the French department 

 of Bouches-du-Rh6ne, on a bay in the Mediter- 

 ranean, 23 miles SE. of Marseilles by rail. It has 

 a good and commodious harbour, the extensive 

 workshops of the Messageries Maritimes Company, 

 and a great coral fishery. Pop. (1891) 10,342. 



Cipher. See CRYPTOGRAPHY and MONOGRAM. 



Cipriani, GIAMBATTISTA, history-painter and 

 designer, was born at Florence in 1727, of an 

 old Pistoja family. He received some instruction 

 from Hugford, a Florentine painter of English 

 parentage, and he studied for three years in 

 Rome. In 1755 he was induced by Sir William 

 Chambers and Wilton the sculptor to settle in 

 London, where his graceful drawings, which were 

 reproduced by the graver of Bartolozzi, gained 

 great popularity, and exercised a favourable influ- 

 ence upon the English school of figure-pain ters. 

 He was a member of the St Martin s Lane 

 Academy, and in 1768 was elected a foundation 

 member of the Royal Academy, to whose exhibi- 

 tions he contributed till 1779, and whose diploma 

 he designed in 1768. His pictures, of which some 

 are preserved at Houghton, are less successful than 

 his designs, being feeble, poor in colour, and with 

 little expression. As an etcher he is known by a 

 *ew plates in Hollis's Memoirs. He married in 

 1761 an English lady of fortune, and died at 

 Hammersmith, 14th December 1785. 



Circaea, a small and unimportant but widely 

 distributed genus of rather pretty little Onagra- 

 ceous herbs. C. lutetiana, frequent in shady 

 situations, bears the name of Enchanter's Night- 

 shade, and in Germany Hexenkraut (Witches' 

 Herb). The origin of these names is not easily 

 explained, as the plant possesses no remarkable 

 properties, being merely a little astringent. 



Circars, THE NORTHERN (Sarkdr, 'a govern- 

 ment ' ), is the historical name for an Indian terri- 

 tory lying along the coast of the Bay of Bengal, 

 from 18 to 100 miles wide, with an area of 17,000 

 miles. It nearly corresponds with the present 

 Madras districts of Ganjam, Vizagapatam, Goda- 

 vari, Kistna, and parts of Nellore and Karnul. 

 In 1757 the Circars were ceded to the French by 

 the subahdar of the Deccan ; but after a struggle, 

 in which Lord Clive had the chief part, the Delhi 

 court in 1766 granted the Circars to the East India 

 Company ; but not till 1823 did they become really 

 a British possession. 



Circassia, a territory on both sides of the 

 western Caucasus. See CAUCASUS. 



Circassians, in the wide sense of the term, is 

 the name given to all the formerly independent 

 tribes of the Caucasus ; in a narrower sense, it 

 denotes the tribes (called by themselves Adighe, 

 by the Turks and Russians, Tcherkesses] who in- 

 habited the north-western \ving of the Caucasus, 

 with a government half patriarchal and feudal, and 

 half constitutional. In 1858-65, rather than sub- 

 mit to Russian government, nearly the whole nation 

 of fifteen tribes, to the number of nearly half a 

 million persons, left their country for the Turkish 

 possessions in Asia Minor, or the mountainous 

 parts of Bulgaria, carrying with them their in- 



subordinate spirit and marauding habits, which 

 added to the horror of the Bulgarian massacres of 

 1876 and 1877. 



The Circassian nobles are principally Moham- 

 medans, whilst the great mass of tne people pro- 

 fess a corrupt Christianity, which shows strange 

 survivals of earlier heathenism in its sacrifices and 

 sacred trees, joined to the celebration of Easter, 

 the sign of the cross, and processions with lights. 

 The Circassians are proverbially handsome for 

 generations their daughters have adorned the 

 harems of the wealthy Turks ; they are also strong, 

 active, brave, and temperate. As a nation they 

 made their first historical appearance during the 

 middle ages. They are, however, chiefly known 

 through their long struggles to maintain their 

 independence against the aggression of Russia. 

 See article CAUCASUS, and Ernest Chantre's mag- 

 nificent work, Eecherches anthropologiques dans le 

 Caucase (5 vols. folio, Paris-Lyons, 1885-87). The 

 first volume contains an exhaustive bibliography ; 

 the fifth is devoted to a detailed account of the 

 peoples of the Caucasus as they now exist. 



Circe, a sorceress of ancient Greek story, 

 described in the Odyssey as ' fair-haired, a clever 

 goddess, possessing human speech,' sister of 'all- 

 wise ^Esetes,' daughter of 'the Sun, who gives 

 light to mortals, and of Perse, whom Ocean begot 

 as his daughter.' Round her palace in ^Eeea were 

 numbers of human beings, whom she had changed 

 into the shapes of wolves and lions by her drugs 

 and incantations. She changed two-and-twenty of 

 the companions of Ulysses into swine ; but that 

 hero, having obtained from Mercury the herb 

 Moly, went boldly to the palace of the sorceress, 

 remained uninjured by her drugs, and induced her 

 to disenchant his comrades. He remained with 

 her for a year ; and when he departed, she in- 

 structed him how to avoid the dangers which he 

 would encounter on his homeward voyage. Ovid 

 relates how, when she was jealous of Scyfla, whose 

 love was sought by Glaucus, she poured the juice 

 of poisonous herbs into that part of the sea where 

 her rival was accustomed to bathe, and so changed 

 her into a hideous monster. 



Circle, a plane figure bounded by a curved 

 line called its circumference, which is everywhere 

 equally distant from a point within it called the 

 centre. The circumference is sometimes itself 

 called the circle, but in geometry that term is 

 properly applied only to the surface or area 

 bounded by the curve. Any line drawn through 

 the centre, and terminated by the circumference 

 is a diameter, which is therefore bisected in the 

 centre (see ARC, CHORD). In Co-ordinate Geo- 

 metry, the circle ranks as a curve of the second 

 order, and belongs to the class of the conic sections. 

 It is got from the right cone by cutting the cone 

 by a plane perpendicular to its axis. The circle 

 may be described mechanically with a pair of 

 compasses, fixing one foot in the centre, and trac- 

 ing out the curve with the other held at a fixed 

 distance. The following are some of its leading 

 properties : 



1. Of all plane figures having the same peri- 

 meter, the circle contains the greatest area. 



2. Of all plane curves, the circle alone has the 

 same curvature at every point. 



3. The circumference of a circle bears a certain 

 constant ratio to its diameter. This constant 

 ratio, which mathematicians usually denote by 

 the Greek letter w (perimeter), has been deter- 

 mined to be 3-14159, nearly, so that, if the dia- 

 meter of a circle is 1 foot, its circumference is 

 3'14159 feet ; if the diameter is 5 feet, the cir- 

 cumference is 5x3'14159; and, in general, if the 

 diameter is expressed by 2r (twice the radius), 



