 consistence of firm,
close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight
or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
    Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's
skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact
these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any
other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and
the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that
be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape
off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat
resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and
soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and
thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits,
which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before;
and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with
fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read
about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving
at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,
invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin
of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply
ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and
more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.
    Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as
in the case of a very large sperm whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred
barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight,
that oil, in its expressed state, is only three-fourths, and not the entire
substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that
animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid
as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight
of only three-quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin.
    In life, the visible surface of the sperm whale is not the least among the
many marvels he presents.
