iness interests in the South, and during the
financial panic of 1873, the promptness with which Mr Claflin met these
crises and paid every dollar of his liabilities greatly increased his
reputation for business ability and integrity. He died at Fordham, New
York, on the 14th of November 1885.

CLAIRAULT (or CLAIRAUT), ALEXIS CLAUDE (1713-1765), French
mathematician, was born on the 13th or 7th of May 1713, at Paris, where
his father was a teacher of mathematics. Under his father's tuition he
made such rapid progress in mathematical studies that in his thirteenth
year he read before the French Academy an account of the properties of
four curves which he had then discovered. When only sixteen he finished
a treatise, _Recherches sur les courbes a double courbure_, which, on
its publication in 1731, procured his admission into the Academy of
Sciences, although even then he was below the legal age. In 1736,
together with Pierre Louis Maupertuis, he took part in the expedition to
Lapland, which was undertaken for the purpose of estimating a degree of
the meridian, and on his return he published his treatise _Theorie de la
figure de la terre_ (1743). In this work he promulgated the theorem,
known as "Clairault's theorem," which connects the gravity at points on
the surface of a rotating ellipsoid with the compression and the
centrifugal force at the equator (see EARTH, FIGURE OF THE). He obtained
an ingenious approximate solution of the problem of the three bodies;
in 1750 he gained the prize of the St Petersburg Academy for his essay
_Theorie de la lune_; and in 1759 he calculated the perihelion of
Halley's comet. He also detected singular solutions in differential
equations of the first order, and of the second and higher degrees.
Clairault died at Paris, on the 17th of May 1765.

CLAIRON, LA (1723-1803), French actress, whose real name was CLAIRE
JOSEPH HIPPOLYTE LERIS, was born at Conde sur l'Escaut, Hainaut, on the
25th of January 1723, the natural daughter of any army sergeant. In 1736
she made her first stage appearance at the Comedie Italienne, in a small
part in Marivaux's _Ile des esclaves_. After several years in the
provinces she returned to Paris. Her life, meanwhile, had been decidedly
irregular, even if not to the degree indicated by the libellous pamphlet
_Histoire de la demoiselle Cronel, dite Fretillon, actrice de la Comedie
de Rouen, ecrite par elle-meme_ (The Hague, 1746), or to be inferred
fro