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Then, cut some slips out of the insides of sweet almonds, fashion them as much in the shape of spermaceti wicks as you can, stick them into your mock candles, light them for an instant, so as to make their tops black, blow them out again, and they are ready for use.
In the top part of this enormous head, inside big cavities separated by cartilage, you'll find 300 to 400 kilograms of that valuable oil called "spermaceti." The sperm whale is an awkward animal, more tadpole than fish, as Professor Frédol has noted. It's poorly constructed, being "defective," so to speak, over the whole left side of its frame, with good eyesight only in its right eye.
MR. BARRAUD. "First, from the blubber which is the outer covering, or, as whalers call it, the 'blanket-piece; this is stripped off by means of an ingenious contrivance, cut into pieces, and the oil boiled out. Secondly, from the head, which is called the 'case, and sometimes contains from ten to fifteen barrels of oil and spermaceti.
The oil is no new discovery, but it is only lately that it has been found to be as quite as good for the manufacture of candles as either spermaceti or wax.
The river of Sierra Leone abounds in fish, and the spermaceti whale has been occasionally found, the shark, the porpoise, eels, mackarel, mullet, snappers, yellow tails, cavillos, tenpounders, &c. with the mannittee, a singular mass of shapeless flesh, having much the taste of beef, which the natives greatly esteem, and consider the highest offering they can make.
Whalers say that a forty-barrel bull of the spermaceti sort is much the most dangerous to deal with of all the animals of this species. The larger bulls are infinitely the most powerful, and drive these half-grown creatures away in herds by themselves, that are called 'pads, a circumstance that probably renders the young bull discontented and fierce.
But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clear whale oil for illuminating purposes, the tough and supple whalebone, the spermaceti which filled the great case in the sperm-whale's head, the precious ambergris prized even among the early Hebrews, and chronicled in the Scriptures as a thing of great price were prizes, in pursuit of which men braved every terror of the deep, threaded the ice-floes of the Arctic, fought against the currents about Cape Horn, and steered to every corner of the Seven Seas the small, stout brigs and barks of New England make.
Candles burned down to their sockets, forming picturesque grottoes of spermaceti as they declined; lamps went out in suffocating fumes. Some insisted on having a window up, others on having it down.
"I can't say much on that point: I only know that, when a sperm whale is killed, they make oil out of the fat part as they do of ours; but the Sperms have a sort of cistern in their heads, full of stuff like cream, and rose-colored. They cut a hole in the skull, and dip it out; and sometimes get sixteen or twenty barrels. This is made into what you call spermaceti candles.
But when shellac, sulphur, or spermaceti was interposed between the two spheres of one jar, while air occupied this interval in the other, then he found that the instrument occupied by the 'solid dielectric' takes more than half the original charge. A portion of the charge was absorbed by the dielectric itself. The electricity took time to penetrate the dielectric.
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