“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish
to me, tho.’”
“May be; may be. But it’s made a
wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab standing
there, sideways looking over the stern? Well,
the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old
man alone; never speak to him, whatever he says.
Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of
ye! There are whales hereabouts!
If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t
there a small drop of something queer about that,
eh? A white whale—did ye mark that,
man? Look ye—there’s something
special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask.
Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind.
But, mum; he comes this way.”
Cetology
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but
soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities.
Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy
hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of
the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend
to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative
understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations
and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in
his broad genera, that I would now fain put before
you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification
of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities
have laid down.
“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as
that which is entitled Cetology,” says Captain
Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
“It is not my intention, were it in my power,
to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of
dividing the cetacea into groups and families....
Utter confusion exists among the historians of this
animal” (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D.
1839.
“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable
waters.” “Impenetrable veil covering
our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A
field strewn with thorns.” “All these
incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.”
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John
Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy.
Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little,
yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small
degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.
Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen
and seamen, who have at large or in little, written
of the whale. Run over a few:— The
Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi;
Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius;
Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten;
Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett;
J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead;
and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate
generalizing purpose all these have written, the above
cited extracts will show.
