A slight digression arising out of the subject took me away from the seals, or rather from the cetaceans, or whale tribe, which come next to them in that orderly sequence by which land animals pass, gradually, into water ones. Now, therefore, I will resume the thread. One of the very largest, and, in the sense of our title-page, most romantic of these great creatures is the sperm-whale or cachalot. He may grow to seventy-six feet long, with a girth round the hugest part of him of quite thirty-eight feet. Or say, rather, that he has been known to grow to that size. What he may sometimes grow to who can say? Just as there are, or have been, elephants standing twelve feet from the ground, though, as a rule, this largest of the pachyderms does not attain to much over ten feet, so _amongst_ the giants of the deep, there are, no doubt, giants too, though, owing to their rarity, the chances are against the look-out man, in the crow’s-nest of a whaling-ship, ever setting eyes on one. Why should not one imagine so, since with much greater facilities for observation, and much more variety, probably, in the subject of it, one might walk about the streets of London all one’s life, without ever seeing a man seven feet high? Yet there _are_ men seven feet high—yes, and eight feet or nine feet, or at least there have been—and so, perhaps, in the vast ocean solitudes that they inhabit, there may, here and there, be a great bull cachalot of eighty or ninety feet long—perhaps even a hundred feet.