425 
THE WHITE WHALE 
to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go 
where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold 
to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the 
-Egypti an mummies that were buried thousands of years before even 
Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern 
Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals 
sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative 
proportions in which they are drawn just as plainly prove that the 
high-bred stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far 
exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of 
all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should 
have degenerated. 
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more 
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient 
lookouts at the mastheads of the whale ships, now penetrating even 
through Behring’s Straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and 
lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted 
along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can 
long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he 
must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, 
like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the 
final puff. 
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of 
buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands 
the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and 
scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous 
river capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar 
an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem 
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy 
extinction. 
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short 
a period ago — not a good lifetime — the census of the buffalo in Illinois 
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present 
day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region ; and though 
the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man ; yet the 
far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglor- 
ious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the 
