George's;
ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,
not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him.
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways
purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the famous
cavern-pagoda of Elephants, in India. The Brahmins maintain
that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda,
all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man,
were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.
No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession
of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo
whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan,
learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture
is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail
of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong.
It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda,
than the broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian
painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better
than the antediluvian Hindoo.
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