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No dignity in whaling ? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest . Cetus is a constellation in the South ! No more ! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar , and take it off to Queequeg ! No more ! I know a man that , in his lifetime , has taken three hundred and fifty whales . I account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns . And , as for me , if , by any possibility , there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me ; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of ; if hereafter I shall do anything that , upon the whole , a man might rather have done than to have left undone ; if , at my death , my executors , or more properly my creditors , find any precious MSS . in my desk , then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling ; for a whale - ship was my Yale College and my Harvard . CHAPTER 25 . Postscript . In behalf of the dignity of whaling , I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts . But after embattling his facts , an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise , which might tell eloquently upon his cause — such an advocate , would he not be blameworthy ? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens , even modern ones , a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through . There is a saltcellar of state , so called , and there may be a castor of state . How they use the salt , precisely — who knows ? Certain I am , however , that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation , even as a head of salad . Can it be , though , that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well , as they anoint machinery ? Much might be ruminated here , concerning the essential dignity of this regal process , because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair , and palpably smells of that anointing . In truth , a mature man who uses hair - oil , unless medicinally , that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere . As a general rule , he can’t amount to much in his totality . But the only thing to be considered here , is this — what kind of oil is used at coronations ? Certainly it cannot be olive oil , nor macassar oil , nor castor oil , nor bear’s oil , nor train oil , nor cod - liver oil . What then can it possibly be , but sperm oil in its unmanufactured , unpolluted state , the sweetest of all oils ? Think of that , ye loyal Britons ! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff !
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