Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals,
so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come.
To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.
There you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result
of expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale,
but the walrus is not a fish, because he is amphibious.
But the last term of the definition is still more cogent,
as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed
that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat,
but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish
the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes
a horizontal position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other hand,
link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.* Hence,
all the smaller, spouting and horizontal tailed fish must be included
in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand divisions
of the entire whale host.
*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled
Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins
of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists among the whales.
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