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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are
represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over
their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made
of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain
Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round
Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the
Spermaceti Whale Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting
to be a "Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale
from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on
deck." I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for
Moby Dick |
