Whalebone Whales
The Fin-Back’s possession of baleen leads to its grouping with right whales under the category “Whalebone whales,” encompassing varieties such as broad-nosed whales, beaked whales, pike-headed whales, bunched whales, under-jawed whales, and rostrated whales. However, the text argues that classification by baleen, hump, fin, or teeth proves fundamentally flawed, as these features appear inconsistently across different whale species without regard to their more essential structural differences. The sperm whale and humpbacked whale both possess humps, yet share no further similitude; similarly, the humpbacked whale and Greenland whale both have baleen but differ in other critical respects. Attempts to systematize whales through these detached physical characteristics have uniformly failed, and even internal anatomy offers no more reliable foundation for classification than external features.
Bibliographical System
Given the inadequacy of both external and internal anatomical features as classification criteria, the chapter proposes the “Bibliographical system”—a method that takes whales in their “entire liberal volume” and sorts them bodily. This approach, it is argued, represents the only feasible and successful classification method for the Leviathan, acknowledging that while traditional anatomical categories may facilitate casual reference, they cannot yield a rigorous scientific system. The text presents this bodily classification as a bold, practical solution to the longstanding failure of naturalists to successfully categorize whales.
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