That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour--this is surely a noteworthy thing.
And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695.
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Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.