And Lacepede,
the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,
in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale
at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet.
And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale
of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time.
And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was),
will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand
how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried
thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure
so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in
which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred,
stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal,
but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine;
in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals
the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient
look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating
even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers
and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted
along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan
can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc;
whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters,
and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe,
and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
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