Moby Dick

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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. There are some preliminaries to
settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of
Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from
the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,
sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict,
were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from