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- bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious
marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the
creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the
certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the
savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we
must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance
will seem reasonable.
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a
third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
“There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
upper _chop_, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts
impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
countenance.
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was
in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as
you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a
tent spread over the same bone.
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,
standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all
these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not
think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil.
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no
great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible
of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are
there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely
anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet
lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other
will not be very long in following.
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same
he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now
faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the
other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw.
Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical
resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a
Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in
his latter years.
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