Moby Dick: Cetology

ALREADY WE ARE BOLDLY launched upon the deep;
but soon we shall be lost in its unshored,
harbourless 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.” (...)

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to
put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in
the remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are
Beale’s and Bennett’s; both in their time surgeons to English
South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The
original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their
volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent
quality, though mostly confined to scientific description.
As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives
not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted
whales, his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for
the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter
in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise
nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to
be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I
shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various
species, or—in this place at least—to much of any de-
scription. My object here is simply to project the draught of a
systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the
Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of
the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a
fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of
this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me.
“Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold
the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these
visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try.