119 
THE WHITE WHALE 
ings in Job might well appal me. “Will he (the leviathan) make a 
covenant with thee ? Behold the hope of him is vain !” But I 
have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to 
do with whales with these visible hands ; I am in earnest ; and I will 
try. There are some preliminaries to settle. 
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology 
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it 
still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System 
of Nature, a. d. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales 
from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the 
year 1850, sharks and shads, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s 
express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas 
with the Leviathan. 
The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the 
whales from the waters, he states as follows : “On account of their 
warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow 
ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex 
lege naturae jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends 
Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of 
mine in a certain voyage and they united in the opinion that the 
reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted 
they were humbug. 
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old-fashioned 
ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me. 
This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal 
respect does the whale differ from other fish l Above, Linnaeus has 
given you those items. But in brief, they are these : lungs and warm 
blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold-blooded. 
Next : how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as 
conspicuously to label him for all time to come ? To be short, then, a 
whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him. 
However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded medi- 
tation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a 
fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is 
still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have 
noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a 
