For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself;
Or board the Nautilus, with its movie-size window panes.
From Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" (1869):
"I had never before had the chance to observe living creatures that could move freely in their natural element."
(William Butcher translation)
