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MOBY DICK; OR 
breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be 
correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really 
be used by the Narwhal — however that may be — it would certainly be 
very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets. The Nar- 
whal I have heard called the Tusk whale, the Homed whale, and the 
Unicom whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism 
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. F rom certain 
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn 
was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and 
as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also dis- 
tilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns 
of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was 
in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me 
that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen 
Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of 
Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; “when 
Sir Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black Letter, “on bended 
knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Nar- 
whal, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor.” An 
Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did like- 
wise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of 
the unicorn nature. 
The Narwhal has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a 
milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. 
His oil is very superior, clear, and fine ; but there is little of it, and he 
is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas. 
BOOK II. {Octavo), Chaptee IV. {Killer ). — Of this whale little 
is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the pro- 
fessed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should 
say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage — a 
sort of Feejee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the 
lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to 
death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he 
has. Exceptions might be taken to the name bestowed upon this 
whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on 
land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included. 
