418 MOBY DICK; OR 
CHAPTER CII 
MEASUREMENT OF TIIE WHALERS SKELETON 
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain state- 
ment, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we 
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here. 
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly 
base upon Captain Seoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest 
size Greenland whale of sixty feet in length ; according to my careful 
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between 
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty 
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least 
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would con- 
siderably out weigh the combined population of a whole village of one 
thousand one hundred inhabitants. 
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should he put to 
this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination? 
Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout- 
hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall 
now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of 
his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very 
large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far 
the most complicated part ; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning 
it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under 
your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion 
of the general structure we are about to view. 
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy- 
two feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must 
have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about 
one fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two 
feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet; leaving some fifty 
feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something 
less than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs 
which once enclosed his vitals. 
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, 
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled 
