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.
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