Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

First Preliminary: Settlement of Whale as Fish

The narrator addresses the unsettled condition of cetology, noting that whether a whale is a fish remains a moot point. Though Linnæus separated whales from fish in 1776, sharks and other fish were still dividing possession of the seas with the Leviathan well into the 1850s. The narrator rejects Linnæus’s reasoning regarding warm bilocular hearts, lungs, movable eyelids, hollow ears, and other characteristics. He declares he takes the good old-fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, calling upon holy Jonah to back him. The key differences from other fish are lungs and warm blood, whereas all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.

Second Preliminary: Definition of a Whale

The narrator proposes a concise definition: a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. This definition results from expanded meditation. A walrus spouts like a whale but is not a fish because it is amphibious. The horizontal tail is more cogent, as most fish familiar to landsmen have vertical, up-and-down tails, while among spouting fish the tail invariably assumes a horizontal position. By this definition, all smaller spouting, horizontal-tailed fish are included. The narrator specifically excludes lamantids and dugongs (pig-fish and sow-fish), denying their credentials as whales since they do not spout.

Primary Whale Divisions by Magnitude

The narrator proposes his grand division of the entire whale host according to magnitude into three primary books, sub-divisible into chapters. These are: I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. THE OCTAVO WHALE; III. THE DUODECIMO WHALE. The type of the Folio is the Sperm Whale; of the Octavo, the Grampus; of the Duodecimo, the Porpoise. The Folio division includes: the Sperm Whale, the Right Whale, the Fin-Back Whale, the Hump-backed Whale, the Razor Back Whale, and the Sulphur Bottom Whale.