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TUPPER, MARTIN F.—TURBOT
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succeeded Bowell in the premiership. On both patriotic and commercial grounds he urged the adoption of a preferential tariff with Great Britain and the sister colonies. At the general election in the ensuing June the Conservatives were severely- defeated, and Sir Charles Tupper and his colleagues resigned, Sir Wilfrid Laurier becoming premier. The Conservative party now gradually became more and more disorganized, and at the next general election, in November 1900, they were again defeated. Sir Charles Tupper, who had long been the Conservative leader, sustained in his own constituency of Cape Breton his first defeat in forty years.


TUPPER, MARTIN FARQUHAR (1810–1889), English writer, the author of Proverbial Philosophy, was born in London on the 17th of July 1810. He was the son of Martin Tupper, a doctor, who came of an old Huguenot family. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a prize for a theological essay, Gladstone being second to him. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, but never practised. He began a long career of authorship in 1832 with Sacra Poesis, and in 1838 he published Geraldine, and other Poems, and for fifty years was fertile in producing both verse and prose; but his name is indissolubly connected with his long series of didactic moralisings in blank verse, the Proverbial Philosophy (1838–1867), which for about twenty-five years enjoyed an extraordinary popularity that has ever since been the cause of persistent satire. The first part was, however, a comparative failure, and N. P. Willis, the American author, took it to be a forgotten work of the 17th century. The commonplace character of Tupper’s reflections is indubitable, and his blank verse is only prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy was full of a perfectly genuine moral and religious feeling, and contained many apt and striking expressions. By these qualities it appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public. A genial, warm-hearted man, Tupper’s humane instincts prompted him to espouse many reforming movements; he was an early supporter of the Volunteer movement, and did much to promote good relations with America. He was also a mechanical inventor in a small way. In 1886 he published My Life as an Author; and on the 29th of November 1889 he died at Albury, Surrey.


TURBAN, the name of a particular form of head-dress worn by men of Mahommedan races. The earlier forms of the word in English are turbant, turband, and tolibanl or tulipant, the latter showing that variant of the original which survives in the name of the flower, the tulip. All these forms represent the French adaptation of the Turkish tulbend, a vulgarism for dulbend, from Persian dulband, a sash or scarf wound round the head. The Moslem turban is essentially a scarf of silk, fine linen, cotton or other material folded round the head, sometimes, as in Egypt, round the tarbush or close-fitting felt cap; sometimes, as in Afghanistan, round a conical cap; or, as among certain races in India, round the skull-cap or kullah. Races, professions, degrees of rank, and the like vary in the style of turban worn; distinctions being made in size, methods of folding, and colour and the like (see India: Costume). At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, a species of head- dress somewhat resembling the true turban in outward form was worn by ladies of western nations, chiefly for use indoors.


TURBERVILLE (or Turbervile), GEORGE (1540?–1610?), English poet, second son of Nicholas Turberville of Whitchurch, Dorset, belonged to an old Dorsetshire family, the D'Urbervilles of Mr Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess. He became a scholar of Winchester College in 1554, and in 1561 was made a fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1562 he began to study law in London, and gained a reputation, according to Anthony à Wood, as a poet and man of affairs. He accompanied Thomas Randolph in a special mission to Moscow to the court of Ivan the Terrible in 1568. Of his Poems describing the Places and Manners of the Country and People of Russia (1568) mentioned by Wood, only three metrical letters describing his adventures survive, and these were reprinted in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589). His Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets appeared “newly corrected with additions” in 1367. In the same year he published translations of the Heroycall Epistles of Ovid, and of the Eglogs of Mantuan (Gianbattista Spagnuoli, called Mantuanus), and in 1568 A Plaine Path to Perfect Vertue from Dominicus Mancinus. The Book of Falconry or Hawking and the Noble Art of Venerie (printed together in 1575) may both be assigned to Turberville. The title page of his Tragical Tales (1587), which are translations from Boccaccio and Bandello, says that the book was written at the time of the author’s troubles. What these were is unknown, but Wood says he was living and in high esteem in 1594. He probably died before 1611. He is a disciple of Wyat and Surrey, whose matter he sometimes appropriated. Much of his verse is sing-song enough, but he disarms criticism by his humble estimate of his own powers.

His Epitaphs &c. were reprinted in Alexander Chalmers’s English Poets (1810), and by J. P. Collier in 1867.


TURBET I HAIDARI, a district of the province of Khorasan in Persia, bounded N. by Meshed, E. by Bakharz, S. by Khaf and W. by Turshiz. It has a population of about 30,000, composed chiefly of members of the Turki Karai tribe and Beluchis. The Karais were settled here by Timur in the 14th century and now provide a battalion of infantry and 1 50 cavalrymen to the army. The district contains about 150 villages and hamlets, most of them situated in its more fertile eastern part, and pays a yearly revenue of £14,000. Much silk was formerly produced, now very little, but there are large crops of grain.

Turbet i Haidari, the capital of the district, is 76 m. nearly S. of Meshed, in 35° 17′ N., 59° 11′ E., at an elevation of 4100 ft. The town is picturesquely situated on the bank of a deep and wide ravine in the midst of lofty hills, and surrounded by clusters of villages. Its population amounts to 8000 souls. There is a well-stocked bazaar and a number of Russian traders have established themselves here since 1903, when the place was connected with Meshed on one side and with Seistan on the other side by a telegraph line which, nominally Persian, is worked and maintained by a Russian staff. A British consul has resided here since 1905, and there is also a post-office.

The place was formerly known as Zavah and derives its present name from the turbet or tomb of a holy man named Kutb ed din Haidar, the founder of the ascetic sect of dervishes known as the Haidaris. He died c. 1230 and is buried in a large domed building a short distance outside the town.


TURBINE (Lat. turbo, a whirlwind, a whirling motion or object, a top), in engineering, a machine which applies the energy of a jet of water or steam to produce the rotation of a shaft. It consists essentially of a wheel or chamber provided with a number of blades or vanes upon which the fluid jet impinges; the impelled fluid causes the blades to rotate and also the shaft to which they are attached. Water turbines are treated under Hydraulics, and steam turbines under Steam Engine.


TURBOT[1] (Rhombus maximus or Psetta maxima), one of the largest and most valuable of the flat-fishes or Pleuronectidae. The turbot, which rarely exceeds a length of two feet, has great width of body, and is scaleless, but is covered with conical bony tubercles. The eyes are on the left side of the body, the lower being slightly in advance of the upper; the mouth is large and armed with teeth of uniformly minute size. The turbot is found all round the coasts of Europe (except in the extreme north), preferring a flat sandy bottom with from 10 to 50 fathoms of water. The broad banks off the Dutch coast are a favourite resort. It is a voracious fish, and feeds on other fish, crustaceans and molluscs. It seems to constantly change its abode, wandering northward during the summer, and going into deeper water in the cold season. The eggs of the turbot, like those of the majority of flat-fishes, are pelagic and buoyant. They are small and very numerous, varying from five to ten millions in fish of 18 to 21 ℔ weight. The young fish are symmetrical and swim

  1. The word “turbot” is of great antiquity, perhaps of Celtic origin; it is preserved in French in the same form as in English, and is composed of two words, of which the second is identical with the “but” in halibut and with the German “Butte,” which signifies flat-fish. The German name for the turbot is “Steinbutte.”