How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? For within 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 entire circle of the sciences, and all of the generations of whales, and males, and mastodons, previous, current, and to come back, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Detached damaged fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been discovered at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that whereas in the sooner geological strata there are discovered the fossils of monsters now virtually fully extinct; the following relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations appear the connecting, or at any price intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are stated to have entered the Ark; all of the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary interval, which is the final previous the superficial formations.
When i stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the prevailing breeds of sea-monsters; however at the identical time bearing on the other hand related affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne again to that wondrous period, ere time itself could be said to have begun; for time started with man. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I’ve been a stone-mason, and likewise an excellent digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the lengthy, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a bit of resembled the hull of an awesome ship new-laid upon the stocks, when solely some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, however a protracted, disconnected timber. A major illustration of the fact, again and again repeated on this e book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes however little clue to the shape of his fully invested body.
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two ft; so that when totally invested and prolonged in life, he will need to have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared with the living physique. Now, the best depth of the invested physique of this particular whale will need to have been at the least sixteen ft; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little greater than eight ft. And here be it mentioned, that whenever it has been convenient to seek the advice of one within the course of those dissertations, I’ve invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly bought for that function; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk extra fitted him to compile a lexicon to be utilized by a whale writer like me. Still more, for the ample fins, I right here saw but a number of disordered joints; and instead of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
Having already in varied ways put before you his skull, spout-gap, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers different elements, I shall now simply level out what’s most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. Having already described him in most of his current habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now stays to amplify him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Among the more curious of such stays is part of a skull, which within the yr 1779 was disinterred within the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a brief road opening nearly straight upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the good docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time. He grew to become premier in 1881 and was an outspoken atheist and great orator. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures concerning the waist; only consider the gigantic involutions of his intestines, the place they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.