Cetology

Melville spends a lot of time making fun of scientific writing. The chapter "Cetology" exemplifies his attitude. Instead of dividing the whales in the scientifically accepted categories, he creates his own: folio, octavo, and duodecimo. These, according to the Norton footnotes, are "technical terms by which printers and booksellers classify the size of books and their pages, from large to small." He is "treating whales as if they were books" (118). Natural enough for Melville to do, since his whale is a book, his book a whale. Melville changes the common scientific classifications in creative protest. The scientific definition in its attempt at logical description loses the beauty of the thing, the cosmic romance. He is raging against technical writing that would "devise a pure 'observation language,' free of emotion and metaphysics which pollute ordinary language" (Carolyn Miller, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing" 49).