Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish? — Moby-Dick

Ishmael asks whether whales have shrunk over time. He checks the fossil record and finds the opposite. Whales alive today are larger than Tertiary fossils. Even among fossils, later ones beat earlier ones. The biggest fossil skeleton in Alabama was under seventy feet. Modern skeletons run seventy-two feet, and whalemen say living sperm whales near one hundred feet have been caught.

Ancient writers like Pliny claimed whales as big as acres or eight hundred feet long. Ishmael calls these rope-walk myths. Working whalemen do not believe them. He compares Egyptian mummies and old cattle carvings to modern animals and says other beasts grew, not shrank. So he will not admit whales alone have degenerated. Still, Nantucketers worry. Lookouts and harpoons now reach every sea. Will hunters kill the last whale, who smokes his last pipe like the last man?

Buffalo once filled Illinois prairies but vanished in one lifetime. That looks like proof whales will die too. Ishmael says the hunts are not the same. Forty men at sea for forty-eight months may bring home oil from only forty whales. Buffalo hunters could kill forty thousand in the same time. Whales also swim in huge caravans, retreat to polar ice, and live more than a century with many generations alive at once. Ishmael concludes the whale is immortal as a species, though each whale dies alone. He swam before continents rose and will spout defiance even if the world floods again.