 hundred and twenty yards; that is,
three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his
elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets
down the right whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet.
And this work was published so late as A. D. 1825.
    But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of 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 Egyptian 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 look-outs at the mast-heads
of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through Behring 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
