Indeed, place this reversed skull
(scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls,
and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking
the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase
you would say--This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration.
And by those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact
of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to yourself
the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what
the most exalted potency is.
But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain,
you deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I
have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost
any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance
of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls,
all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.
It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance,
I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive.
A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe
he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying,
in a sort of basso-relieve, the beaked prow of his canoe.
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