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“ May be ; may be . But it’s made a wise man of me , Flask . D’ye see Ahab standing there , sideways looking over the stern ? Well , the best thing you can do , Flask , is to let the old man alone ; never speak to him , whatever he says . Halloa ! What’s that he shouts ? Hark ! ” “ Mast - head , there ! Look sharp , all of ye ! There are whales hereabouts ! “ If ye see a white one , split your lungs for him ! “ What do you think of that now , Flask ? ain’t there a small drop of something queer about that , eh ? A white whale — did ye mark that , man ? Look ye — there’s something special in the wind . Stand by for it , Flask . Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind . But , mum ; he comes this way . ” CHAPTER 32 . Cetology . Already we are boldly launched upon the deep ; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored , harbourless immensities . Ere that come to pass ; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan ; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow . It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera , that I would now fain put before you . Yet is it no easy task . The classification of the constituents of a chaos , nothing less is here essayed . Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down . “ No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology , ” says Captain Scoresby , A . D . 1820 . “ It is not my intention , were it in my power , to enter into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families . * * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal ” ( sperm whale ) , says Surgeon Beale , A . D . 1839 . “ Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters . ” “ Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea . ” “ A field strewn with thorns . ” “ All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists . ” Thus speak of the whale , the great Cuvier , and John Hunter , and Lesson , those lights of zoology and anatomy . Nevertheless , though of real knowledge there be little , yet of books there are a plenty ; and so in some small degree , with cetology , or the science of whales . Many are the men , small and great , old and new , landsmen and seamen , who have at large or in little , written of the whale . Run over a few : — The Authors of the Bible ; Aristotle ; Pliny ; Aldrovandi ; Sir Thomas Browne ; Gesner ; Ray ; Linnæus ; Rondeletius ; Willoughby ; Green ; Artedi ; Sibbald ; Brisson ; Marten ; Lacépède ; Bonneterre ; Desmarest ; Baron Cuvier ; Frederick Cuvier ; John Hunter ; Owen ; Scoresby ; Beale ; Bennett ; J . Ross Browne ; the Author of Miriam Coffin ; Olmstead ; and the Rev . T . Cheever . But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written , the above cited extracts will show .
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