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The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me.  "Will he (the leviathan)

make a covenant with thee?  Behold the hope of him is vain!

But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans;

I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest;

and I will try.  There are some preliminaries to settle.



First:  The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science

of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact,

that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether

a whale be a fish.  In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776,

Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from the fish."

But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,

sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's

express edict, were still found dividing the possession

of the same seas with the Leviathan.



The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished

the whales from the waters, he states as follows:  "On account

of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids,

their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,"

and finally, "ex lege naturae jure meritoque."  I submitted all

this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket,

both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in

the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient.

Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.



Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned

ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal

respect does the whale differ from other fish.  Above, Linnaeus has given

you those items.  But in brief they are these:  lungs and warm blood;

whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.



Next:  how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals,

so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come.

To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.

There you have him.  However contracted, that definition is the result

of expanded meditation.  A walrus spouts much like a whale,

but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious.

But the last term of the definition is still more cogent,

as coupled with the first.  Almost any one must have noticed

that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat,

but a vertical, or up-and-down tail.  Whereas, among spouting fish

the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes

a horizontal position.



By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude

from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified

with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand,

link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence,

all the smaller, spouting and horizontal tailed fish must be included

in this ground-plan of Cetology.  Now, then, come the grand divisions

of the entire whale host.





*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled

Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins

of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales.

But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set,

mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay,

and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials

as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit

the Kingdom of Cetology.





First:  According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS

(subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,

both small and large.



I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II.  the OCTAVO WHALE; III.  the DUODECIMO WHALE.



As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO,

the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.



FOLIOS.  Among these I here include the following chapters:--

I. The Sperm Whale; II.  the Right Whale; III.  the Fin Back Whale; IV.

the Humpbacked Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI.

the Sulphur Bottom Whale.



BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).--This whale,

among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale and

the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present

Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans,

and the Macrocephalus of the Long Words.  He is, without doubt,

the largest inhabitant of the globe; the most formidable of all

whales to encounter; the most majestic in aspect; and lastly,

by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the only creature

from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is obtained.

All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon.

It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do.

Philologically considered, it is absurd.  Some centuries ago,

when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own

proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally

obtained from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti,

it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from

a creature identical with the one then known in England as

the Greenland or Right Whale.  It was the idea also, that this

same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale

which the first syllable of the word literally expresses.

In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce,

not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament.

It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy

an ounce of rhubarb.  When, as I opine, in the course of time,

the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name

was still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its

value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity.

And so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed

upon the whale from which this spermaceti was really derived.



BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II.  (Right Whale).--In one respect this

is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first

regularly hunted by man.  It yields the article commonly known

as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil,"

an inferior article in commerce.  Among the fishermen,

he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles:

The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale;

the True Whale; the Right Whale.  There is a deal of obscurity

concerning the Identity of the species thus multitudinously baptized.

What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of

my Folios?  It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists;

the Greenland Whale of the English Whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire

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The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet,

and in depth more than four.  The smallest, where the spine tapers

away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something

like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still

smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins,

the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things

tapers off at last into simple child's play.







CHAPTER 104



The Fossil Whale





From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme

whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.  Would you,

you could not compress him.  By good rights he should only be

treated of in imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his furlongs

from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist;

only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines,

where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away

in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.



Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves

me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;

not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,

and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.

Having already described him in most of his present habitatory

and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in

an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.

Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--

such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.

But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger

to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.

And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult

one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge

quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;

because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted

him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.



One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,

though it may seem but an ordinary one.  How, then, with me,

writing of this Leviathan?  Unconsciously my chirography

expands into placard capitals.  Give me a condor's quill!

Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!  Friends, hold my arms!

For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan,

they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching

comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle

of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men,

and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving

panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,

not excluding its suburbs.  Such, and so magnifying, is the

virtue of a large and liberal theme!  We expand to its bulk.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,

though many there be who have tried it.



Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my

credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous

time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,

canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.

Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader,

that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils

of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics

discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting,

or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures,

and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark;

all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period,

which is the last preceding the superficial formations.  And though

none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time,

they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify

their taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.



Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones

and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,

been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France,

in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi,

and Alabama.  Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull,

which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris,

a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries;

and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,

in Napoleon's time.  Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged

to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.



But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost

complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,

on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.  The awe-stricken credulous

slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.

The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it

the name of Basilosaurus.  But some specimen bones of it being taken

across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this

alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species.  A significant

illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book,

that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape

of his fully invested body.  So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon;

and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it,

in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations

of the globe have blotted out of existence.



When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,

skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized

by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters;

but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to

the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors;

I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time

itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.

Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim,

shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged

bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics;

and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference,

not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible.

Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation,

he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and

the Himmalehs.  Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?  Ahab's harpoon

had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy.

I look round to shake hands with Shem.  I am horror-struck

at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable

terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,

must needs exist after all humane ages are over.