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And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty , misty monster , to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea ; his vast , mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor , engendered by his incommunicable contemplations , and that vapor — as you will sometimes see it — glorified by a rainbow , as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts . For , d’ye see , rainbows do not visit the clear air ; they only irradiate vapor . And so , through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind , divine intuitions now and then shoot , enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray . And for this I thank God ; for all have doubts ; many deny ; but doubts or denials , few along with them , have intuitions . Doubts of all things earthly , and intuitions of some things heavenly ; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel , but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye . 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 . This triune structure , as much as anything else , imparts power to the tail . To the student of old Roman walls , the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique , and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry . But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough , the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments , which passing on either side the loins and running down into the flukes , insensibly blend with them , and largely contribute to their might ; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point . Could annihilation occur to matter , this were the thing to do it .
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