Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/116

 TOURACOU, the name, evidently already in use, under which in 1743 G. Edwards figured a pretty African bird, and presumably that applied to it in Guinea, whence it had been brought alive. It is the Cuculus persa of Linnaeus, and Turacus or Corythaix persa of later authors. Cuvier in 1799 or 1800 Latinized its native name (adopted in the meanwhile by both French and German writers) as above, for which barbarous term J. K. W. Illiger, in 1811, substituted a more classical word. In 1788 Isert described and figured (Beobacht. Gesellsch. naturf. Freunde, iii. 16–20, pl. 1) a bird, also from Guinea, which he called Musophaga violacea. Its affinity to the original Touracou was soon recognized, and both forms have been joined by modern systematists in the family Musophagidae, commonly Englished Plantain-eaters or Touracous.

 TOURAINE, an old province in France, which stretched along both banks of the Loire in the neighbourhood of Tours, the river dividing it into Upper and Lower Touraine. It was bounded on the N. by Orléanais, W. by Anjou and Maine, S. by Poitou and E. by Berry, and it corresponded approximately to the modern department of Indre et Loire. Touraine took its name from the Turones, the tribe by which it was inhabited at the time of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. They were unwarlike, and offered practically no resistance to the invader, though they joined in the revolt of Vercingetorix in 52. The capital city, Caesarodunum, which was built on the site of the eastern part of the present city of Tours, was made by Valentinian the metropolis of the 3rd Lyonnaise, which included roughly the later provinces of Touraine, Brittany, Maine and Anjou. Christianity seems to have been introduced into Touraine not much earlier than the beginning of the 4th century, although tradition assigns St Gatien, the first bishop of Tours, to the 3rd. The most famous of its apostles was St Martin (fl. 375–400), who founded the abbey of Marmoutier, near Tours, and whose tomb in the city became a celebrated shrine. Tours was besieged by the Visigoths in 428, and though it offered a successful resistance on this occasion it was included fifty years later in the territory of the Visigoths. The Tourangeans refused to adopt the Arian heresy of their conquerors, and this difference in religion materially assisted in 507 the conquest of the province by Clovis, whose orthodoxy was guaranteed by the miraculous intervention of St Martin. St Clotilda, wife of Clovis, spent the last years of her life in retreat at Tours. The possession of Touraine was constantly the subject of dispute between the Merovingian princes, and the province enjoyed no settled peace until the reign of Charlemagne. He established Alcuin as abbot of St Martin of Tours, and under his auspices the school of Tours became one of the chief seats of learning in