for the book-binder's whale
winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--as
stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both
old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.
Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old
Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival
of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively
late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the
Leviathan.

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner
of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,
come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some
curious whales.

But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." 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 the benefit of his marines.
To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which
applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm
whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet
long. Ah, my gallant c