TROPIC BIRD 



5885 



TROUT 



shipyards, sugar refineries, sawmills, breweries 

 and machine shops. Population in 1910, 45,335. 

 TROPIC BIRD or BOATSWAIN, boht' 

 swayn, a bird which flies continually over tropic 

 waters, diving perpendicularly for fish, in the 

 manner of terns, but distinguished from them 

 by its long, willowy, middle tailfeathers. Its 

 plumage is pure white or pinkish in color and 

 of a remarkably soft, satiny appearance. The 

 best-known species is the red-billed tropic bird, 

 which occurs accidentally as far north as New- 

 foundland. It is pure white, with a coral-red 

 bill, and is nearly forty inches in length, twenty- 

 six inches being the measure of the tail. Others 

 are the yellow-billed and the red-tailed tropic 

 birds. All species nest in colonies, in holes or 

 crevices in the rocks or on the bare sand. The 

 one egg is whitish or brownish, mottled with 

 dark brown. Male and female incubate in turn. 



TROPICS, trop'iks, in astronomy, two circles 

 on the celestial sphere, lying parallel with the 

 equator and distant from it twenty-three and 

 one-half degrees each. They mark the seem- 

 ing limits of the sun's journeys north and south 

 of the equator. The northern one touches the 

 ecliptic at the zodiacal sign Cancer, and is ac- 

 cordingly called the Tropic of Cancer; the 

 southern tropic takes the name Capricorn for a 

 similar reason. 



In Geography. The tropics are the two paral- 

 lels of latitude which pass through the extreme 

 southerly and northerly points on the earth's 

 surface at which the sun can be seen directly 

 overhead. The tropic north of the equator is 

 the Tropic of Cancer and that south of the 

 equator the Tropic of Capricorn. Each is 

 twenty-three and one-half degrees from the 

 equator. The tropics mark the limits of that 

 zone of the earth's surface which has the high- 

 est temperature, with a comparatively small 

 range of variation throughout the year. This is 

 called the torrid zone. The regions included in 

 the torrid zone are usually spoken of as the 

 tropics. 



Related Subjects. The reader is referred to 

 the following- articles in these volumes : 

 Astronomy Capricorn 



Cancer Zone 



TROTZKY, trots' ki, LEON (bora 1877), whose 

 real name is LEBER BRONSTEIN, is a Russian Jew 

 who rose from penury to the second most pow- 

 erful post in Russia after the revolution of 1917. 

 He had lived in Siberia as an exile from 1905 

 to 1912, afterwards roaming over Europe as an 

 agitator and finding for a time a haven in New 

 York City among the anarchistic elements of 



the lower East Side. In America he earned $12 

 per week as editor of a radical periodical, and 

 was a well-known member of New York's revo- 

 lutionary element. 



After the czar's downfall he hurried to Russia 

 and allied himself with Nikolai Lenine as an 

 autocrat in the new Bolshevist government, be- 

 coming Minister of Foreign Affairs and later 

 Minister of War. The rule of these two men 

 is outlined in the article RUSSIA. See, also, 

 LENINE, NIKOLAI. 



TROUBADOUR, troo'ba duhr, a group of 

 lyrical poets who flourished in Southern France 

 between the eleventh and the fourteenth cen- 

 turies. As composers of charming love poems, 

 expressed in the musical Provencal dialect, they 

 stand out in literary history as interesting fig- 

 ures of the romantic age of chivalry. They 

 idealized beauty, grace and courtesy, and in 

 their verses lauded the romance of war and ad- 

 venture, but more than all, they sang of the 

 beauty of love. They led a wandering life, 

 traveling from court to court and singing their 

 verses to admiring knights and their ladies. 

 Those of the troubadours who could not sing 

 taught their verses to professional musicians 

 called jongleurs. Sometimes the jongleurs ac- 

 companied the poets and played while the lat- 

 ter sang, and occasionally the jongleur himself 

 was a troubadour. 



TROUT, a group of fish belonging to the 

 same family as the salmon, many species of 

 which are important food and game fish. 

 Nearly all kinds of trout are inhabitants of 

 fresh waters, and they are much sought by 

 anglers who frequent northern lakes and rivers. 

 As a rule they are gamy and possess voracious 

 appetites. Scientists divide trout into two main 

 classes, according to the shape of the vomer. 

 or bone forming the front part of the roof of 

 the mouth. One group, represented by the 

 salmon trout, has a flat vomer, with teeth on 

 its shaft; the other group has a boat-shaped 

 vomer, with teeth on the head of the bone. 

 The latter class embraces the charrs, or true 

 trout. Salmon trout (which see) are structur- 

 ally the link between salmon and trout. 



Of all the charrs, none is more widely known 

 than the brook trout, an active and beautiful 

 fish found originally in the Appalachian regions, 

 westward through the Great Lakes territory to 

 Minnesota, and in the Dominion of Canada 

 from the Saskatchewan River to Labrador. It 

 is native to these regions, but has been intro- 

 duced into various lakes and streams of the 

 Upper Mississippi Valley and the West. It 



