If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure
back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old;
and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky;
in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's
high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics.
But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every
man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other
human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones,
who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest
peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings,
how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee
of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you.
Read if it if you can.
CHAPTER 80
The Nut
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull
is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout
on a level base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined
plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous
superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.
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