In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.  The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in depth.  Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet.  So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of that part.  Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.  Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

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 vertebrae 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.