Moby Dick

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the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you
can.



CHAPTER 80. The Nut.


If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.

In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is
angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to