soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth : “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s warbrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was written at a time when the black limber-bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale and the sturgeon ; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.
CHAPTER XCI.
the pequod meets the rose-bud.
“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.”
Sir T. Browne, V. E.
It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day
