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MOBY DICK; OR 
piled wood is — by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as tbe 
smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the 
specialties and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this 
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more incon- 
siderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant 
incredulity, and be ready to abide by this ; that though the Sperm 
Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the 
Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your 
eyebrow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and 
sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander 
giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials 
then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s 
veil at Lais? 
CHAPTER LXXVI 
THE GREAT HEIDELBURGH TUN 
How comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, 
you must know something of the curious internal structure of the 
thing operated upon. 
Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may on 
an inclined plane sideways divide it into two quoins , 1 whereof the 
lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the 
upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones: its broad forward 
end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. 
At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper 
quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were 
naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance. 
The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honey- 
comb of oil, formed by the crossing and re-crossing, into ten thousand 
infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole 
extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the 
1 Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathe- 
matics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid 
which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep 
inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides. 
