Moby Dick

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statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,