282 
MOBY DICK; OR 
one hundred barrels of oil ; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, 
or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three-fourths, 
and not the entire substance of the coat ; some idea may hence be had 
of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere 
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. 'Reckoning ten barrels 
to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters 
of the stuff of the whale’s skin. 
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among 
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over 
obliquely crossed and recrossed with numerous straight marks in thick 
array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But 
these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance 
above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it as if they were en- 
graved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the 
quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but 
afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical ; 
that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids 
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present con- 
nection. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one 
Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing 
the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades 
on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, 
the mystic marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the 
Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other 
phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not 
seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great 
part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude 
scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that 
those New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to 
bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs — 
I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm 
Whale in this particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in 
the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; 
for I have most remarked them in the large, full grown bulls of the 
species. 
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber 
of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stripped from him in 
