420 
MOBY DICK; OR 
on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The 
largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and 
in depth more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away 
into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a 
white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, hut 
they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, 
who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the 
spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple 
child’s play. 
CHAPTEE CIII 
THE FOSSIL WHALE 
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme 
whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, 
you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated 
of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle 
to tail, and the yards he measured about the waist ; only think of the 
gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great 
cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlopdeck of a line- 
of-battle ship. 
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves 
me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not 
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him 
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described 
him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it 
now remains to magnify him in an archseological, fossiliferous, and 
antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the 
Leviathan — to an ant or a flea — such portly terms might justly be 
deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the 
text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under 
the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that 
whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these 
dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, 
expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicog- 
