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- 10658
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- 2026-01-23T15:41:03.445Z
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- 10612
- text
- 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.
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that
picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary
retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is
not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of
a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that
is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the
pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage;
breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of
mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue
paint.
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a
drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent
the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living
Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The
living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen
at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out
of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element
it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily
into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a
ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying
shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not
catch.
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