July 27, 2019 - Chapter Eighty-five

Today’s chapter is, frankly, a bit dull. In it, the narrator – presumably Ishmael – provides a discourse on the breathing apparatus of the whale and its spout. He confesses his lack of scientific training but assures the reader that the account is correct. Of course it is not – camels don’t store water in their humps, for instance. So perhaps it’s worth noting that Moby Dick was published eight years before Darwin’s Origin of Species. As a result, the ability of Melville (and most everyone) to more clearly see connections between types of animals on the basis of evolution by natural selection was simply absent. As a result, all of the zoology offered by the novel must be taken with a huge grain of salt.