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1From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.
2Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over
3again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
4involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean
5orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship. Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve
6myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning
7him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and
8anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of
9view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed
10unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise
11under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one
12in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for
13that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used
14by a whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an
15ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals.
16Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of
17penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of
18sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons,
19past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not
20excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To
21produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,
22though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a
23geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,
24canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind
25the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely
26extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
27intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the
28Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
29superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
30sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils. Detached broken fossils
31of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
32found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana,
33Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was
34disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and
35bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to
36have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species. But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the
37almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in
38Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The
39Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it
40being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though
41of a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton
42of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
43Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most
44extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence. When I stand among these mighty
45Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing
46breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated
47antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time
48itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim,
49shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics;
50and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then
51the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the
52Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah
53seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of
54the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are
55over. But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone
56and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost
57fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
58some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in
59centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among
60them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. Nor
61must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian
62reality, as set down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller. "Not far from the Sea-side, they have a
63Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up
64dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can
65pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that
66shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's Rib of an incredible
67length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which
68cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years
69before I saw it. Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do
70not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple." In this Afric Temple
71of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
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