Chapter 104 The Fossil Whale
第一百零四章 化石鲸
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
大鲸那非凡的身躯，就是一个最适宜于详尽发挥的题材。你就是想把它加以压缩也是压缩不了的。当然只有把它当成一种极上等的对开本才行。用不着再提它那从头到尾的长度，也不必量它那腰围的尺寸，只消想一想盘卷在它腹内的那些巨大的肠子就够了，它腹内的那些肠子就跟盘在军舰最底层甲板里那些粗大缆索锚链一模一样。
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea— such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.
我既然已经答应来处理这种大鲸，我就该在这件工作上竭尽智能地显一显我的身手；既不忽略它血液里的最细小的病原菌，还要竭尽全力把它肚腹内所盘结着的东西都给拉出来。关于它的体质上和组织上的特点，我已经谈了许多，现在剩下来的就是要以一种考古学的、化石的和上古的观点来把它加以放大、象这样堂而皇之的名词，如果用之于大鲸以外的任何一种生物——蚂蚁或者跳蚤——也许应该认为是夸张得太不切实际了。可是，一碰上大鲸这个题目，那可又当别论。