1 I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are.
2 His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
3 It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls.
4 In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in length.
5 Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 6 Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base.
7 The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
8 If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.
9 If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.
10 Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 11 If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view.
12 Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. 13 Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull.
14 The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides. 15 When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.