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- royal beadle on his throne.
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
aspect is sublime.
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has
a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles,
the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is
as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their
decrees. It signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip
of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which
like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low,
that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes;
and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the
antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters
track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this
high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely
amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the
Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other
object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one
distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a
forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats,
and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish;
though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In
profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark
of genius.
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a
book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing
nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue,
or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall
lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and
livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now
unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great
Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s
face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing
fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could
not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle
meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you
can.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist
his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to
square.
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
base. But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is
angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—in
another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in
depth—reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away
behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance
of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in
strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it
seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that
mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.
It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the
common world.
If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its
resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from
the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down
to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would
involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on
one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man
had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you
deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you
will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung
necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely
undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the
Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
the vertebræ of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man’s
character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel
your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine
never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in
the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the
world.
Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
it passes through the remaining vertebræ the canal tapers in size, but
for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course,
this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the
spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And
what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s
cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal
to that of the brain.