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- antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless
call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so
intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an
old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the
Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a
comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a
species of the Leviathan.
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you
will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all
manner of spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and
Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the
title-page of the original edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you
will find some curious whales.
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among
ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another
plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with
perpendicular flukes.
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain
Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round
Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the
Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to
be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from
one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.”
I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the
benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say
that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale,
to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a
bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not
give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
mistake. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In
the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged
“whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this
unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the
narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this
nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon
any intelligent public of schoolboys.
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great
naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long
experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
counterpart in nature.
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