, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all
its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their
full-lengths, the living leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his
portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be
seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of
sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so
as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the
highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a
full-grown Platonian leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young
sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like,
limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself
could not catch.
    But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one
of the more curious things about this leviathan, that his skeleton gives very
little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs
for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the
idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other
leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred
from any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and
padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelops
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this
book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side
fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand,
minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle,
ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy
covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. »However recklessly
the whale may sometimes serve us,« said humorous Stubb one day, »he can never be
truly said to handle us without mittens.«
    For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
conclude that the great leviathan is that one creature in the world which must
