安德烈亚·切萨尔皮诺1524—1603

Andrea Cesalpino (Latinized as Andreas Cæsalpinus) (1524/1525 – 23 February 1603) was a Florentine physician, philosopher and botanist.

In his works he classified plants according to their fruits and seeds, rather than alphabetically or by medicinal properties. In 1555, he succeeded Luca Ghini as director of the botanical garden in Pisa. The botanist Pietro Castelli was one of his students. Cesalpino also did limited work in the field of plant and animal physiology. In medicine, he envisioned a "chemical circulation" consisting of repeated evaporation and condensation of blood, and for this reason historians have conceived him as a forerunner of William Harvey (1578–1657), who theorized the "physical circulation" of blood in 1628.

Biography

Cesalpino was possibly born in Arezzo, Tuscany. As it is reported by Giuseppe Lais and Ugo Viviani, and recently repeated in a scholarly volume devoted to Cesalpino, he was likely born in the autumn of 1524 or 1525 in the outskirt of Arezzo but many authors give 1519 as the year of his birth, e.g. Frans Stafleu in his Taxonomic Literature 2.

For his studies at the University of Pisa his instructor in medicine was R. Colombo (d. 1559), and in botany the celebrated Luca Ghini. After completing his course he taught philosophy, medicine, and botany for many years at the same university, besides making botanical explorations in various parts of Italy. At this time the first botanical gardens in Europe were laid out; the earliest at Padua, in 1546; the next at Pisa in 1547 by Ghini, who was its first director. Ghini was succeeded by Cesalpino, who had charge of the Pisan garden 1554–1558.

Philosophical works

All of Cesalpino's writings show the man of genius and the profound thinker. His style, it is true, is often heavy, yet in spite of the scholastic form in which his works are cast, passages of great beauty often occur. Modern botanists and physiologists who are not acquainted with the writings of Aristotle find Cesalpino's books obscure; their failure to comprehend them has frequently misled them in their judgment of his achievement.

No comprehensive summing up of the results of Cesalpino's investigations, founded on a critical study of all his works has appeared, neither has there been a complete edition of his writings. Seven of these are positively known, and most of the seven have been printed several times, although none have appeared since the 17th century. In the following list the date of publication given is that of the first edition.

Medical and physiological works

Cesalpino's physiological investigations concerning the circulation of the blood are well known, but even up to the present time they have been as often overestimated as undervalued. An examination of the various passages in his writings which bear upon the question shows that although it must be said that Cesalpino had penetrated further into the secret of circulation of the blood than any other physiologist before William Harvey, still he had not attained a thorough knowledge, founded on anatomical research, of the entire course of the blood. Besides the work Quæstionum peripateticarum already mentioned, reference should be made to Quaestionum medicarum libri duo (1593).

Botanical works

His most important publication was De plantis libri XVI (1583). The work is dedicated to the Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici. Unlike the "herbals" of that period, it contains no illustrations. The first section, including thirty pages of the work, is the part of most importance for botany in general. From the beginning of the 17th century up to the present day botanists have agreed in the opinion that Cesalpino in this work, in which he took Aristotle for his guide, laid the foundation of the morphology and physiology of plants and produced the first scientific classification of flowering plants.

Geology

As mentioned above, De metallicis libri tres (Rome, 1596) was of value for mineralogy and geology, displaying a correct understanding of fossils. Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology states that in 1596,

Cesalpino, a celebrated botanist, conceived that fossil shells had been left on the land by the sea, and had concreted into stone during the consolidation of the soil."