346 
MOBY DICK; OR 
CHAPTER LXXXV 
THE TAIL 
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the ante- 
lope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less 
celestial, I celebrate a tail. 
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that 
point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it 
comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of a least fifty 
square feet. The compact round body of its root expands into two 
broad, firm, fat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an 
inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly 
overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a 
wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty 
more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. 
At its utmost expansion in the full-grown whale, the tail will con- 
siderably exceed twenty feet across. 
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; 
but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it: — 
upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, 
are long and horizontal ; those of the middle one, very short, and run- 
ning crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as 
much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of 
old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to 
the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those 
wonderful relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so 
much to the great strength of the masonry. 
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not 
enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and 
woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side 
the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with 
them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the 
confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated 
to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing 
to do it. 
