JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I was digging a little in Herman Melville and Moby-Dick and fell into eleven pages of his scholarly ruminations on the depictions of whales in art and literature, fictional and otherwise. Its really a very fine little gem, bobbing there in the nearly the exact middle of the book. (It is not the middle of the middle of the middle like Gettysburg in Mr. Foote’s The Civil War, a Narrative, where as it happens the battle appears in the middle chapter if the middle volume, but it is close enough.) Here it is, from the full text at the University of Virginia: