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- 17669
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- 2026-01-18T02:42:21.441Z
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- 17616
- text
- 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
rank 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 vertebræ, 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 school-boy. 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.
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