 no
Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face.
Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then,
Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest
peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered
Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the sperm whale's brow? I but put that
brow before you. Read it if you can.
 

                                  Chapter LXXX

                                    The Nut

If the sperm whale be physiognomically a sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain
seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
    In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in
length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side
view of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in
life - as we have elsewhere seen - this inclined plane is angularly filled up,
and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At
the high end the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under
the long floor of this crater - in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in
length and as many in depth - reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain.
The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is
hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in
him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the sperm whale
has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the
cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and
convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of
his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
intelligence.
    It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this leviathan, in the
creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain,
you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things
that are mighty, wears a false bow to the common world.
    If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its
rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the
human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view.
Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to
