But how?  Genius in the Sperm Whale?  Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech?  No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it.  It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.  And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts.  They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion.  If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics.  But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.  Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable.  If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow?  I but put that brow before you.  Read if it if you can.

CHAPTER 80

The Nut

If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.

In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length.  Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base.  But in life—­as we have elsewhere seen—­this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm.  At the high end the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—­in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in depth reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain.  The brain is at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec.  So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine.  Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion.  As for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any.  The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.