“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”

“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 harborless 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; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; 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.