Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/507

Rh the task of flattering his sitters, whilst hiding that flattery behind the just and striking likeness which, says Mariette, he hardly ever missed. His portraits of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Louis XV., of his queen, of the dauphin and dauphiness, are at once documents and masterpieces un surpassed except by his life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, which, exhibited at the Salon of 1755, is still the chief ornament of the cabinet of pastels in the Louvre. It is and will probably always be the most perfect model of this class of work as long as time and damp spare the fragile dust to which it owes its beauty. The museum of St Quentin, however, also possesses a magnificent collection of works which at his death were in his own hands. De la Tour retired to St Quentin at the age of 80, and there he died on 17th February 1788. The riches amassed during his long life were freely bestowed by him in great part before his death; he founded prizes at the school of fine arts in Paris and for the town of Amiens, and endowed St Quentin with a great number of useful and charitable institutions. He never married, but lived on terms of warm affection with his brother (who survived him, and left to the town the drawings now in the museum); and his relations to Mdlle. Fel, the celebrated singer, were distinguished by a strength and depth of feeling not common to the loves of the 18th century.

See, in addition to the general works on French art, Desmaze, three works, of which the most important is Le Reliquaire de la Tour; Guiffrey and Tourneux, Correspondance Inedite de M. Q de la Tour; Champfleury, De la Tour, and Peintres de Loon et de St Quentin; and Dreolle de Nodon, Eloge Biographique de M. Q. de la Tour.

 TOURACO, the name, evidently already in use, under which in 1743 Edwards figured a pretty African bird, and presumably that applied to it in Guinea, whence it had been brought alive. White-Crested Touraco (Turacus albicristatus). After Schlegel.

It is the Cuculus persa of Linnæus, and Turacus or Corythaix persa of later authors, who perceived that it required generic separation. 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 Illiger, in 1811, substituted a more classical word. In 1788 Isert described and figured (Beobacht. Gesellsch. naturf. Freunde, iii. pp. 16-20, pi. 1) a bird, also from Guinea, which he called Musophaga violacea. Its affinity to the original Touraco was soon re cognized, and both forms have been joined by modern systematists in the Family Musophagidæ, commonly Englished Plantain-eaters or Touracos, sometimes spelt Tourakoos.

To take first the Plantain-eaters proper, or the genus Musophaga, of which only two species are known. One about the size of a Crow is comparatively common in museums, and is readily recognised by haviog the horny base of its fine yellow bill prolonged backwards over the forehead in a kind of shield. The top of the head, and the primaries, except their outer edge and tip, are deep crimson; a white streak extends behind the eye; and the rest of the plumage is of a rich glossy purple. The second species, M. rossaz, which is rare, chiefly differs by wanting the white eye-streak. Then of the Touracos—the species originally described is aboxit the size of a Jay, and has the head, crest (which is vertically com pressed and tipped with red), neck, and breast of a fine grass-green, varied by two conspicuous white streaks—one, from the gape to the upper part of the crimson orbit, separated by a black patch from the other, which runs beneath and behind the eye. The wingcoverts, lower part of the back, and tail are of a bright steel-purple, the primaries deep crimson, edged and tipped with bluish-black. Over a dozen other congeneric species, more or less resembling this, have now been described, and all inhabit some district of Africa; but there is only room here to mention that found in the Cape Colony and Natal, where it is known as the "Lory" (cf. vol. xv. p. 7, note 1), and, though figured by Daubenton and others, first differentiated in 1841 by Strickland (Ann. Nat. History, vii. p. 33) as Turacus albicristatus its crest having a conspicuous white border, while the steel-purple of T. persa is replaced by a rich and glossy bluish-green of no less beauty. In nearly all the species of this genus the nostrils are almost completely hidden by the frontal feathers; but there are two others in which, though closely allied, this is not the case, and some systematists would place them in a separate genus Gallirex; while another species, the giant of the Family, has been moved into a third genus as Corythxola cristata. This differs from any of the foregoing by the absence of the crimson coloration of the primaries, and seems to lead to another group, Schizorrhis, in which the plumage is of a still plainer type, and, moreover, the nostrils here are not only exposed but in the form of a slit, instead of being oval as in all the rest. This genus contains about half a dozen species, one of which, S. concolor, is the Grey Touraco of the colonists in Natal, and is of an almost uniform slatybrown. A good deal has been written about these birds, which form the subject of one of the most beautiful monographs ever published De Toerako's afgebeld en beschreven, by Schlegel and Westerman, brought out at Amsterdam in 1860; while the latest collected information is contained in an elaborate essay by Herr Schalow (Jour. f. Ornithologie, 1886, pp. 1-77). Still, much remains to be made known as to their distribution throughout Africa, and their habits. They seem to be all fruit-eaters, and to frequent the highest trees, seldom coming to the ground. Very little can be confidently asserted as to their uidification, but at least one species of Schizorrhis is said to make a rough nest and therein lay three eggs of a pale blue colour. An extraordinary peculiarity attends the crimson coloration which adorns the primaries of so many of the Musophagidsz. So long ago as 1818, Jules Verreaux observed (Proc. Zool. Society, 1871, p. 40) that in the case of T. albicristatus this beautiful hue vanishes on exposure to heavy rain and reappears only after some interval of time and when the feathers are dry.

The Musophagidæ form a very distinct Family of Prof. Huxley's Coccygomorphæ, having perhaps the Coliidæ and Cuculidx as their nearest allies. Eyton pointed out (Ann. Nat. History, ser. 3, ii. p. 458) a feature possessed in common by the latter and the Musophagidæ, in the "process attached to the anterior edge of the ischium," which he likened to the so-called "marsupial" bones of Didelphian Mammals. J. T. Reinhardt has also noticed (Vidensk. Meddels. Naturhist. Forening, 1871, pp. 326-341) another Cuculine character offered by the os uncinatum affixed 