 should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell
over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures 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
orlop-deck 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 archæological,
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
lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon 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 placard 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, not excluding its suburbs.
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. No 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
