CHAPTER 86
The Tail
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial,
I celebrate a tail.
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at
that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth
of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area
of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its
root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes,
gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways
recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between.
In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.
At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail
will considerably exceed twenty feet across.
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews;
but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata
compose it:--upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper
and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one,
very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers.
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