--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind?
Subtilize it.
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand,
cant over the sperm whale's head, so, that it may lie bottom up; then,
ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were
it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern
we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach.
But let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are.
What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor
to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane,
glossy as bridal satins.
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw,
which seems like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box,
with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up,
so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems
a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight
in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force.
But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in
the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended,
with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight
down at right-angles with his body; for all the world like a
ship's jibboom.
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