419 
THE WHITE WHALE 
the embryo hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only 
some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is other- 
wise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber. 
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, 
was nearly six feet long ; the second, third, and fourth were each suc- 
cessively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the 
middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that 
part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned 
five feet and some inches. In general thickness they all bore a seemly 
correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most arched. 
In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay 
foot-path bridges over small streams. 
In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the 
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of 
the whale is by no means the mould of this invested form. The 
largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that 
part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. How, the great- 
est depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have 
been at least sixteen feet; whereas the corresponding rib measured but 
little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the 
true notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some 
way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once 
wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and 
bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered 
joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, 
an utter blank ! 
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man 
to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring 
over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. Ho. 
Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddvings 
of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the 
fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out. 
But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with 
a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. Ho speedy enterprise. 
But now it’s done, it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar. 
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are 
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks 
