in the year 1842, on
the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen
angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed
upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out
that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A
significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this
book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the
shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,
pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures
which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.

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. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I
obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged
bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in
all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable
hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines
of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems
a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck
at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of
the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after
all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon th