421 
THE WHITE WHALE 
rapher’s uncommon personal bulk more iitted him to compile a lexi- 
con to be used by a whale author like me. 
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, 
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing 
of this Leviathan ? Unconsciously my chirography expands into pla- 
card capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater 
for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of 
penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make 
me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to 
include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of 
whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all 
the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole 
universe. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and 
liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, 
you must choose a mighty theme. Ho great and enduring volume 
can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. 
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my 
credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time 
I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals 
and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by 
way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the 
earlier geological strata there are found fossils of monsters now almost 
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called 
the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate inter- 
cepted links, between the antechronical creatures, and those whose re- 
mote posterity are said to have entered the Ark. All the Fossil Whales 
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last 
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them pre- 
cisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet 
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking 
rank as Cetacean fossils. 
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their 
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, 
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in Eng- 
land, in Scotland, and in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Ala- 
bama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull. 
