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How vain and foolish , then , thought I , for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale , by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton , stretched in this peaceful wood . No . Only in the heart of quickest perils ; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes ; only on the profound unbounded sea , can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out . But the spine . For that , the best way we can consider it is , with a crane , to pile its bones high up on end . No speedy enterprise . But now it’s done , it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar . There are forty and odd vertebræ in all , which in the skeleton are not locked together . They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire , forming solid courses of heavy masonry . The largest , a middle one , is in width something less than three feet , and in depth more than four . The smallest , where the spine tapers away into the tail , is only two inches in width , and looks something like a white billiard - ball . I was told that there were still smaller ones , but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins , the priest’s children , who had stolen them to play marbles with . Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play . CHAPTER 104 . The Fossil Whale . From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge , amplify , and generally expatiate . Would you , you could not compress him . By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio . Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail , and the yards he measures about the waist ; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines , where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop - deck of a line - of - battle - ship . Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan , it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise ; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood , and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels . Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities , it now remains to magnify him in an archæological , fossiliferous , and antediluvian point of view . Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan — to an ant or a flea — such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent . But when Leviathan is the text , the case is altered . Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary . And here be it said , that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations , I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson , expressly purchased for that purpose ; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me .
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