Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. \n\n<html>\n<img src="http://lowres-picturecabinet.com.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/173/main/186/881473.jpg">\n<img src="http://www.billcasselman.com/jonah_whale.jpg">\n</html>\n\nWhat shall be said of [[these|Anchor]]?
\nIt may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. \n\nFor ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; \n\never since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific presentations of [[him.|Elephanta]]
\nI shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true [[form of the whale|all wrong]].\n
[[OF MONSTROUS PICTURES OF WHALES]] \n
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan.\n\n[[All these are not only incorrect|Cuvier]], \n\nbut the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.\n\n<html>\n<img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7229/7109458777_5e04654143_c.jpg">\n</html>
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some [[curious whales|Harris]].\n\n
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. \n\nIt is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. \n\n<html>\n<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Guido_Reni_-_Andromeda.png/480px-Guido_Reni_-_Andromeda.png">\n</html>\n\nWhere did Guido get the model of such a [[strange creature|Hogarth]] as that?
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, \n\nby those who know. \n\nIn old Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled \n\n"A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." \n\nIn one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. \n\nIn another plate, the [[prodigious blunder|Colnett]] is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
PICTURES OF WHALES
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. \n\nNot at all. \n\nFor it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. \n\nThough Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea \n\nof a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; \n\nyet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. \n\n\nIn fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. \n\nThis peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. \n\nIt is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. \n\nThis fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. \n\nBut all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. \n\n"However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said [[to handle us without mittens|curiosity]]."
Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own "Perseus Descending," make out one whit better. \n\nThe huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. \n\nIt has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, [[might be taken for|Prodromus]] the Traitors' Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. \n\n<html>\n<img src="http://images.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/I/big/315D122a.jpg" width="445" height="587">\n</html>
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain \n\nunpainted to the last. \n\nTrue, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.\n\nSo there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. \n\nAnd the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, \n\nis by going a whaling yourself; \n\nbut by so doing, \n\nyou run no small risk of being eternally \n\nstove and sunk by him. \n\nWherefore, \n\nit seems to me \n\nyou had best not be \n\ntoo fastidious in your curiosity \n\ntouching this Leviathan.\n\n[[BACK|Start]]
Lauraschhh
As for the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new—that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases. \n\n<html>\n<img src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/8603/1/bk_31_printer.jpg" width="324" height="487">\n</html>\n\nThough universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first introduced. \n\nIt was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning; \n\nand in those days, \nand even down to a comparatively late period, \n\ndolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of [[the Leviathan|vignettes]].
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. \n\nConsider! \n\nMost of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. \n\nThough elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait.\n\nThe living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; \n\nand afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; \n\nand out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. \n\nAnd, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; \n\nyet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression [[the devil himself could not catch|fancied]].\n
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Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries." \n\nIn this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck."\n\nI doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. \n\nTo mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. \n\nAh, [[my gallant captain|Natural History]], why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
\nIt is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale [[all wrong|primal]].
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. \n\nThe Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. \n\nNo wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. \n\nThe Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. \n\nBut though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is [[all wrong.|Long list]] \n\nIt looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.\n\n<html>\n\n<img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6wwv5JUps1qb9yj1o1_500.jpg">\n\n</html>
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake.\n\nLook at that popular work "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." \n\nIn the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale" and a "narwhale." \n\nI do not wish to seem inelegant, but [[this unsightly whale|Germain]] looks much like an amputated sow; \n\nand, \n\nas for the narwhale, \n\none glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.\n<html>\n<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Whales_Goldsmith.jpg" width="706" height="486">\n</html>
As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? \n\nThey are generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their [[deformities floundering|Consider]] in seas of blood and blue paint.
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. \n\nIn 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. \n\nBefore showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. \n\nIn a word, \n\nFrederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but \n\na squash. \n\nOf course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell?\n<html>\n<img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/19afeb8147144e654876868609453b16/tumblr_misrn15Y2o1s2cwfno1_1280.jpg" width="651" height="487">\n</html>\nPerhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his [[authentic abortions|Richard III]]; that is, from a Chinese drawing. \n\nAnd what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.