244 
MOBY DICK; OR 
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, hut a squash. Of course, he 
never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), 
hut 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; break- 
fasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whale boats full of mari- 
ners : 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 repre- 
sent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. 
Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living levia- 
than 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 ^ 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-ground Platonian Leviathan ; yet even in the 
case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such 
