Moby Dick

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old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics;
yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's
articulated bones. In 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. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some
part of this book will be incidentally shown. It 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. This fin has four
regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But
all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human
fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may
sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly
said to handle us without mittens."

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