422 
MOBY DICK; OR 
which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, 
a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries ; 
and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in 
Napoleon’s time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have be- 
longed to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species. 
But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost 
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, 
on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken 
credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the 
fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and 
bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen 
bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English anatomist, 
it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a de- 
parted species — a significant illustration of the fact, again and again 
repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but 
little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechrist- 
ened the monster Zeuglodon — ; and in his paper read before the Lon- 
don Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most ex- 
traordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out 
of existence. 
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, 
jaws, rigs, and vertebrae, all characterised by partial resemblances to 
the existing breeds of sea-monsters ; but at the same time bearing on the 
other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Levia- 
thans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that 
wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun ; for time be- 
gan with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain 
dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities ; when wedged bas- 
tions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics ; and in all the 
25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s 
breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; 
and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the 
Andes and the Himalayas. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan ? 
Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaohs. Methuselah 
seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am 
horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeak- 
