The Great White

I began reading Moby Dick last week. It was a gift to me, and having finished a number of other stories, I started this classic. I try each year to tackle one of the great classics. I say "tackle" because they are usually large, detailed, ponderous in fact. (think of Dickens works). When you start one, you must be up for the challenge, but when you finish, you know why they endure. They speak to us universally. The characters may be dressed or speak differently today, but everyone knows these people. The ambitious Becky Sharp, the analytical Sherlock Holmes, the honorable Jean Valjean, the obsessive Captain Ahab!

 

Yes, Ahab is obsessed with catching up with the whale who took off his leg, but of course, the story goes much deeper than that. But, in beginning my reading, the story makes mention of how does one classify the Whale...animal or fish? And then a particular paragraph mentions Carl Lenneaus, and his classification system of taxonomy, published 1735. As he uncovered more and more information, later editions were published. Known as the Systema Naturae, it was rather revolutionary for its time.

Linneaus sites the whale as a mammal, in the CETE classification. He states, "Animals that suckle their young by means of lactiferous teats. In external and internal structure they resemble man: most of them are quadrupeds; and with man, their natural enemy, inhabit the surface of the Earth. The largest, though fewest in number, inhabit the ocean."

His Mammalian Characteristics include

• Heart: 2 auricles, 2 ventricles. Warm, dark red blood
• Lungs: respires alternately
• Jaw: incombent, covered. Teeth usually within
• Teats: lactiferous
• Organs of Sense: tongue, nostrils, eyes, ears, & papillae of the skin
• Covering: hair, which is scanty in warm climates, hardly any on aquatics
• Supports: 4 feet, except in aquatics; and in most a tail. Walks on the Earth & Speaks

His Cete Characteristics include

• Fins: pectoral instead of feet
• Tail: horizontal, flattened
• Claws: none
• Hair: none
• Teeth: in some cartilaginous, in some bony
• Nostrils: none, instead of which is a fistulous opening in the anterior and upper part of the head
• Food: mollusca & fish
• Habitation: the ocean

Linneaus goes on to include the different types of cete, including narwhals, dolphins, porpoise, various whales and then the great sperm whale (The Great White), the largest and the object of Captain Ahab's obsession.

This is what I like about a good book. It makes you want to know more, and as they say, the more you know, the less you know.