Too-Familiar Science in "The Lightning-Rod Man"

Like the "irregular" sound of mountain thunder, much of Melville's 1854 short story The Lightning-Rod Man has been creatively appropriated--that is to say, plagiarized--from questions and answers about the basic science of thunder and lightning in one or another version of a popular nineteenth-century schoolbook. As demonstrated in my first Substack effort,

https://melvilliana.substack.com/p/borrowed-thunder?r=n51cr&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

part one of a two-part essay titled "Borrowed thunder," Melville definitely used some version of Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's influential Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar. Aka "Dr. Brewer's Guide to Science." 

More work is needed to figure out which version Melville used in the 1850's, and where else he used it besides "The Lightning-Rod Man." (Aside: Poor Man's Pudding, for sure, as I will have to show in another post on Substack.) Among the possibilities are two different American editions, both issued in 1851--one published in New York by C. S. Francis, based on Brewer's text in prior English editions

and another, improved American edition published in Philadelphia by Robert Evans Peterson. Melville I think would have appreciated the more coherent arrangement of questions-and-answers in Familiar Science; or, The Scientific Explanation of Common Things (Philadelphia, 1851) and the copious index there, much juicer than in Brewer's English edition. Commonly known in Melville's day as Peterson's Familiar Science.

from "The Lightning-Rod Man"
Putnam's magazine - August 1854 - page 133

One of the more notable instances of creative plagiarism in The Lighting-Rod Man concerns the "returning stroke" of lighting from earth to sky, a phenomenon that fascinates the narrator. Excerpt below is from the first part of my aforementioned Substack essay, Borrowed thunder:  

You can also say with absolute certainty that Melville appropriated essential elements in the conversation about “the returning-stroke” from a printed source, either Dr. Brewer’s Guide or Q and A #36 in Peterson’s Familiar Science:

Q. When lightning flashes from the earth to the clouds, what is the flash called?

A. It is popularly called the “returning stroke;" because the earth (being overcharged with electric fluid,) returns the surplus quantity to the clouds. [page 17]

Here Melville’s rewrite is especially faithful to the original wording of his source-text. Melville has copied it verbatim, in places:

Familiar Science #36 lightning flashes from the earth to the clouds
Lightning-Rod Man: lightning flashes from the earth to the clouds

Familiar Science #36 the earth (being overcharged with electric fluid
Lightning-Rod Man: the earth, being overcharged with the fluid,

Familiar Science #36: returns the surplus quantity to the clouds
Lightning-Rod Man: flashes its surplus upward

The boldness of borrowing here is remarkable, even for a habitual plagiarist like Melville. Brazenly, he imports big chunks of stolen text without bothering to disguise the theft. Along with his telling re-use of “returning stroke,” Melville also hijacked single words from Familiar Science, the verb flashes and noun surplus, and conjoined them in the phrase “flashes its surplus” (“supplies” in the original magazine version, page 133, emended to “surplus” in The Piazza Tales, page 281). Where his source is redundant, Melville compresses. The answer to #36 in Familiar Science repeats part of the question: “to the clouds.” Melville avoids needless repetition through revision, avoiding a second instance of the phrase to the clouds by substituting “upward” instead.

To encourage further study, here is the NYPL copy of the 1854 edition of Peterson's Familiar Science, Google-digitized and accessible online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library.

Related posts:

• Come away from the wall
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2022/03/come-away-from-wall.html

• Melville's source for ill-ventilated warmth in Poor Man's Pudding
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2022/03/melvilles-source-for-ill-ventilated.html

Cetology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Brewster's Edinburgh Encylopaedia

Fig. 4. Spermaceti Whale. CETOLOGY. Plate 134
in Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia Vol. 5, First American Edition (Philadelphia, 1832).

For the Cetology chapter in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Herman Melville had more accurate and up-to-date sources than old editions of Encyclopædia Britannica. Lots of Melville's literary appropriations from the writings of Beale and Bennett and Scoresby are documented in The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick by Howard P. Vincent; and in the notes to the 1952 Hendricks House Moby-Dick that Vincent edited with Luther S. Mansfield. Rounding out the Big Five of Melville's favorite whale-books were more recent firsthand narratives by J. Ross Browne and Henry T. Cheever. In addition, Melville also borrowed extensively from the WHALES entry in The Penny Cyclopædia, as Kendra H. Gaines shows in Melville Society Extracts Number 29, January 1977, pages 6-12.

https://sites.hofstra.edu/melville-society-extracts/wp-content/uploads/sites/96/2020/01/Melville-Extracts_029.pdf

The Penny Cyclopædia referenced the systematizing efforts of various distinguished naturalists without actually calling their kind of work cetology. Earlier in the 19th century, two encyclopedias that did call it "Cetology" were the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. Volume 5 in successive editions (4th, 5th, 6th) of Encyclopaedia Britannica contains a long, illustrated treatise titled "Cetology" on pages 327-360. Notes in the back of the great Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988) page 857 refer to the treatise on Cetology in the 4th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica as "the article on whales."

But the first entry for "WHALE" in Volume 20 tells you to consult the treatise on Cetology in Volume 5:

See BALÆNA and PHYSETER, CETOLOGY Index.

In Volume 5 of Encylopaedia Britannica 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1810), the first of two engravings that accompany the treatise on Cetology is PLATE CXL = Plate 140, labeled "CETOLOGY."

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951002451535v?urlappend=%3Bseq=386

This Cetology engraving illustrates each of the four classes of "cetaceous fishes" (as classified in the main text after Linnaeus, by number and placement of teeth) with one representative figure. Stacked vertically, the figures from top to bottom show a large whalebone or Greenland whale; narwhal or unicorn fish; large sperm whale; and grampus. 

The huge "Greenland whale" (so-called, in the main text and "Explanation of Plates") or "Balaena Mysticetus" at the top of the CETOLOGY plate looks much the largest of the four kinds. Its dominating size and placement agree with the old-school cetology that Ishmael will overthrow by granting first place to the sperm whale:

This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,— the Greenland whale is deposed,— the great sperm whale now reigneth! -- Moby-Dick, Cetology

The immediate textual prompt for Ishmael's mock proclamation was a bit in Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale that represents the Greenland Whale as royalty, metaphorically speaking: "the public voice has long enthroned him as monarch of the deep." Vincent makes the connection to Beale in The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick at page 132. Steven Olsen-Smith examines this and other borrowings in the "Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale," at Melville's Marginalia Online.

The CETOLOGY engraving in the Encyclopaedia Britannica visually reinforces the older idea of the Greenland Whale as "monarch of the deep."

Noah Webster's 1849 American Dictionary of the English Language defines CETOLOGY as

"The doctrine or natural history of cetaceous animals."

Webster even recognizes the CETOLOGIST, "One who is versed in the natural history of the whale and its kindred animals." Still, when Melville appropriated it, the word cetology could also evoke models of scientific discourse that were already outdated. Readers looking up CETOLOGY in the Seventh Edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 6 (Edinburgh, 1842) get redirected to Volume 14: "See MAMMALIA." There, on pages 183-191, "Great-headed whales" conclude the treatment of "Cetacea," the final section in James Wilson's new contribution on the Natural History of Quadrupeds and Whales.

Again, cetology as cetology does not appear in Melville's invaluable source-article in the Penny Cyclopaedia. Beale only employs the word once, when quoting Scoresby in one of four epigraphs at the front. Melville managed to incorporate all four in the Cetology chapter of Moby-Dick. So William Scoresby Jr. happily accepted cetology as the right name for his discipline, aiming to improve it. Indeed, in the second volume of An Account of the Arctic Regions (Edinburgh, 1820) at page 111, Scoresby helpfully footnoted the article "Cetology" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 4th edition.

With Scoresby Melville embraces the word cetology and for fun, adopts the style and some elements of its antiquated practice. The joke of course is how Melville's narrator arranges whales like books according to their size, turning cetology into bibliography. The largest whales are FOLIOS in Ishmael's library system of taxonomy. Sperm Whale and Greenland Whale aka "Right Whale" form Chapters 1 and 2 of the same folio-size Book. Ishmael's Chapter 2 whale embodies the popular mix-up of different species, especially the confusion of the North Atlantic right whale or Eubalaena glacialis and Bowhead whale or Balaena mysticetus--as helpfully explained on the New Bedford Whaling Museum Blog.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on "Cetology" is not listed in the searchable "Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" at Melville's Marginalia Online. Maybe he saw it somewhere, maybe not. One place Encyclopaedia Britannica would have been available to Melville was the New-York Society Library. The NYSL Supplementary Catalogue for 1841 lists the 6th edition only. The 1850 Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society Library lists four different editions of Encyclopædia Britannica, including the 6th and 7th, as well as the six-volume Supplement to the 4th, 5th, and 6th editions.



Scoresby in his Account of the Arctic Regions formally cited "Cetology" from Encyclopaedia Britannica. As noted in the catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online, in 1850-1851 Melville borrowed this and another work by Scoresby, Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-fishery (Sealts Numbers 450 and 451), from the New York Society Library.

If he ever looked into the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Scoresby footnoted, Melville might have found a hint for his book-based system of classification in the way "Cetology" takes the form of discrete "Chapters":

In the following treatise, we propose to lay before our readers, 1st, The Classification and Natural History of Cetaceous Fishes; 2d, Their Anatomy and Physiology. And lastly, the History of the Whale Fishery as an object of trade. These shall be the subjects of three Chapters. -- Cetology, Encyclopædia Britannica Fourth Edition, Vol. 5, page 328.

As Jeff Loveland points out, Cetology was one of seven "new treatises dealing with animals" in the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with Conchology, Erpetology, Helminthology, Ichthyology, Mammalia, and Ophiology, "evidently imitating the zoological categories of the conemporary Encyclopédie méthodique." See Loveland on Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" in Book History Vol. 9 (2006), pages 57-87 at page 75. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227385>  Ichthyology and other zoological treatises in the 4th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica also were constructed in chapters, like books.

As promoted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the old and wonderfully loose category of "cetaceous fishes" accords well with Ishmael's definition of the whale as

 "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."

To aid further study, here are links to successive editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica with the treatise on "Cetology" in Volume 5:

• Encyclopædia Britannica, Fourth Edition (Edinburgh, 1810)
  https://books.google.com/books?id=G2MIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA327&lpg#v=onepage&q&f=false

• Encyclopædia Britannica, Fifth Edition (Edinburgh, 1817)
  https://books.google.com/books?id=fftMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA327&lpg#v=onepage&q&f=false

• Encyclopædia Britannica, Sixth Edition (Edinburgh, 1823)
  https://books.google.com/books?id=4vJhSzDkSAIC&pg=PA327&lpg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Google-digitized volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica held by the New York Public Library and University of Michigan are accessible online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library.

Another nineteenth-century encyclopedia with a major article on "Cetology" was David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia, Volume 5 (Edinburgh, 1830), pages 676-694. Conspicuously, right at the start, the term "Cetaceous Animals" (not fishes) describes "the last order of the class MAMMALIA." Cetology is defined as "that department of Zoology, which treats of the structure, economy, and history of cetaceous animals, or of whales...."

https://books.google.com/booksid=IPpMAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA676&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

The index in Volume 1 to "Authors of the Principal Articles in The Edinburgh Encyclopædia" identifies Josiah Kirby as author of the Cetology treatise there. In Volume 1 of Encyclopædia Britannica, 4th edition (Edinburgh, 1810), "Dr. Kirby, and Dr. Brewster of Edinburgh" had received credit along with general editor James Millar and Lockhart Muirhead for unspecified "articles in the various branches of Natural History."

The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Volume 5 (Edinburgh, 1830) is Google-digitized and available online courtesy of  HathiTrust Digital Library. Illustrated with two plates of engravings, located between pages numbered 688 and 689 in the University of Michigan volume.

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015082314470?urlappend=%3Bseq=736

The Albany Young Men's Association, the library owned a set of the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, listed in the 1837 Catalogue of Books as

1002 ENCYCLOPAEDIA, Brewster's, 33 vols. 

When Herman Melville joined the YMA in January 1835, their set of Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia was incomplete. However, Volume 5 was not among the missing numbers that were advertised as wanted by the Young Men's Association (Albany Argus, January 9, 1835).

Albany Argus - January 9, 1835 via GenealogyBank

The YMA Catalogue of Books for 1848 lists an incomplete set of the American edition, number 4061 under "Dictionaries and Encyclopedias."

A complete set in twenty-one volumes of David Brewster's New Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (Philadelphia, 1832) was available at the New York Society Library when Herman Melville belonged, according to the 1850 Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue.



In the First American Edition (Philadelphia, 1832) of Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Volume 5 contains the "Cetology" article on pages 555-573:

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435028241479?urlappend=%3Bseq=564

Two plates of engravings appear in the back of the same volume:

• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435028241479?urlappend=%3Bseq=876
• https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435028241479?urlappend=%3Bseq=878 

Despite the displacement of "Cetology" in the 7th and later editions of Encyclopædia Britannica, aspiring cetologists like Ishmael in Moby-Dick still had oceans of room to investigate whales:

Let it be borne in mind by the rising race, that in relation to the cetaceous tribes, an enterprising naturalist of accurate habits, well versed in the recorded observations of his predecessors, and at the same time inclined to original investigation, has still before him a vast, and in several of its departments, an almost unexamined field.  --James Wilson on "Mammalia" in the Seventh Edition of The Encylopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1842) Volume 14, page 191. Here signed "T." designating zoologist James Wilson in the alphabetical Table of Signatures. Signed "J. W." in the Eighth Edition (Edinburgh, 1857).

Further reading, A to Z:

• Suzanne Conklin Akbari, The Encyclopedic Genius of Melville’s Masterpiece.
  https://lithub.com/the-encyclopedic-genius-of-melvilles-masterpiece/

• Katrina Zaat, Moby-Dick, Encyclopaedias and Encyclopaedism.
  https://www.academia.edu/22143006/Moby-Dick_Encyclopaedias_and_Encyclopaedism

The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick by Howard P. Vincent, 1949 | Online Research Library: Questia

The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick by Howard P. Vincent, 1949 | Online Research Library: Questia

Pretty truly

In Benito Cereno (1855) Melville introduced the words "pretty" and "truly" when transforming the narrative prose of his source into dialogue. Where Amasa Delano had called assault with a knife "rather serious sport" (not the child's play represented by Benito Cereno), Melville made his Delano say, "Pretty serious sport, truly."

DELANO

Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels (Boston, 1817)

"I told him it appeared to me to be rather serious sport, as the wound had caused the boy to lose about a quart of blood."

MELVILLE

Benito Cereno in Putnam's Monthly - October 1855

"Pretty serious sport, truly," rejoined Captain Delano.

 Look at what Melville keeps, and what else he adds in the rewrite:

DELANO:

I saw this and inquired what it meant.

MELVILLE:

In amazement, Captain Delano inquired what this meant.

DELANO:

The captain replied,

MELVILLE:

... the pale Benito dully muttered,

 DELANO:

 that it was merely the sport of the boys

 MELVILLE:

that it was merely the sport of the lad

Added by Melville to his source, just in this short bit: Delano's "amazement"; calling the Spanish captain by his first name, "Benito"; Benito's "pale" appearance and defeated manner of speaking when he "dully muttered" his reply; and the substitution of "lad" where Delano reported "boys."

So what? is the next question. In answering or say pre-answering, I don't automatically have to knock the work of Amasa Delano. Even the best old-school source studies have on occasion devalued source texts for no good reason, beyond perhaps a perceived need to absolve Melville from the sin of plagiarism. Writing on Melville the Poet, page 130 in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine (Cambridge UP, 2014), Elizabeth Renker urges "a new approach" which at its best might helpfully check groundless discounting.

For a humble start, let's try this. So what? So the changes Melville made here in this small portion of his rewrite of Amasa Delano reveal, on closer scrutiny, not only certain mechanics of his plagiarism creative borrowing, but also certain creative aims. Melville's changes achieve interesting and possibly, arguably, characteristic results. Some notable effects of Melville's retouching here are

• Dramatizing with dialogue.

• Personalizing through names, thereby inviting more empathy.

• Particularizing with descriptive details. Most obviously, added details help develop character and plot. Some embellishments also work to humanize dubious, possibly devilish characters. (Here, Benito Cereno the captain of a slave ship as "pale" and pitiable sufferer.) Melville's singular "lad" replaces Delano's undifferentiated grouping. No longer just one of the "boys," Melville (or Melville's Benito) particularizes and familiarizes the assailant, now a "lad."

• Ennobling. As in Israel Potter, a similar project of rewriting, descriptive additions can work to ennoble the person described. Here the suffering Benito, elsewhere Delano and Babo. The ennobling effect applies to others, too, not only major players. 

• Self-authenticating, truly.

Old-school or new, source study is more fun than ever, now that we have Melville's writings and many of his sources Google-digitized and conveniently accessible via institutional research libraries and amazing places like these:

• Digital Public Library of America

• Fulton History

• HathiTrust Digital Library

• Internet Archive 

• Library of Congress  

• NYPL Digital Collections

• Herman Melville papers - Houghton Library, Harvard University

• Melville's Marginalia Online

Even with splendid digital resources and Melville's writings swelling the PUBLIC DOMAIN, it's a great blessing for scholars to have a haven in print--meaning in this case the 1987 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860. Amasa Delano's Chapter 18 is there for ballast in the back, reproduced with handy marginal cross-references to the main text of "Benito Cereno."

Related posts:

• Amasa Delano, news and views
• Source study 101
• Scoresby's crow's nest, Melvillized
• Nuts and bolts of writing from sources
• Re-writing Old Zack
• Hennig Cohen on The Rebellion Record and Battle-Pieces

Hazlitt's Select British Poets in Albany

British Library

Listed as 

1116 Hazlett's Select British Poets

in the 1837 Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Young Men's Association of the City of Albany (under "H," page 14), this 1824 "Anthology of British Poets," as described online for 21st century readers by the British Library, "brings together past and contemporary poets" including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

"A Critical List of Authors" in the 1824 volume includes "Critical Remarks" (thus labeled on the title page) by William Hazlitt on Wordsworth:

Mr. WORDSWORTH'S characteristic is one, and may be expressed in one word;—a power of raising the smallest things in nature into sublimity by the force of sentiment. He attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects. His peculiarity is his combination of simplicity of subject with profundity and power of execution. He has no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance, with continual rusticity and baldness of allusion; but he is sublime without the Muse's aid, pathetic in the contemplation of his own and man's nature; add to this, that his style is natural and severe, and his versification sonorous and expressive.  --Select British Poets

On Byron et al:

Lord BYRON'S distinguishing quality is intensity of conception and expression. He wills to be sublime or pathetic. He has great wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, caustic wit, but no humour. Gray's description of the poetical character—"Thoughts that glow, and words that burn,"—applies to him more than to any of his contemporaries.

THOMAS MOORE is the greatest wit now living. His light, ironical pieces are unrivalled for point and facility of execution. His fancy is delightful and brilliant, and his songs have gone to the heart of a nation.

LEIGH HUNT has shewn great wit in his Feast of the Poets, elegance in his occasional verses, and power of description and pathos in his Story of Rimini. The whole of the third canto of that poem is as chaste as it is classical.

The late Mr. SHELLEY (for he is dead since the commencement of this publication) was chiefly distinguished by a fervour of philosophic speculation, which he clad in the garb of fancy, and in words of Tyrian die. He had spirit and genius, but his eagerness to give effect and produce conviction often defeated his object, and bewildered himself and his readers.  --Hazlitt, Select British Poets

And Keats:

Mr. KEATS is also dead. He gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day. He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties. --Hazlitt, Select British Poets

Available in Albany by October 1826, Hazlitt's edition might have given Herman Melville his earliest exposure to works by major Romantic poets including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. And thumbnail criticism thereof, in Hazlitt's "Critical Remarks." Melville lived in Albany, New York from October 1830 to May 1838. He joined the Young Men's Association in January 1835 and "managed to keep paying his membership dues for two and a half years," as discussed by Hershel Parker in Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008), page 39. In September 1827 (three years before Herman had to move there), Albany bookseller Oliver Steele advertised "Hazlitt's select British poets, with critical remarks" and other "LONDON BOOKS" for sale in his shop at 437 South Market Street.

Albany Argus - September 17, 1827
via Fulton History

Oliver Steele definitely had the 1824 edition with contemporary poets, as shown by the reference in his ad to Hazlitt's "critical remarks," a phrase borrowed from the title page. Oliver's father Daniel Steele had offered the same edition the year before, as the specifics of his ad in the Black Rock Gazette (October 5, 1826) more clearly reveal:

Select British Poets, or new elegant extracts, from Chaucer to the present time, with critical remarks, by Wm Hazlett, 1 vol. royal 8 vo.

Thu, Oct 5, 1826 – Page 3 · Black Rock Gazette (Black Rock, New York) · Newspapers.com

Daniel Steele "kept the largest and best assortment of books outside of New York City" according to George Rogers Howell in  the Bi-centennial History of Albany:

BOOKSELLERS.

Among the earliest booksellers in Albany are William Seymour; D. K. Van Vechten; Obadiah Penniman, who came to Albany under the great printer, Isaiah Thomas; C. R. & G. Webster; E. & E. Horsford, who kept a store at 100 State street, closed about 1828; E. F. Backus, who made a specialty of law books; Daniel Steele & Son, on Broadway, north of Hudson avenue, who kept the largest and best assortment of books outside of New York City. Daniel Steele died in 1828, and was succeeded by his son, Oliver.

In addition to "Hazlett's Select British Poets," the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Young Men's Association (Albany, 1837) lists two different sets of "British Poets," numbered 1112 (12 vols.) and 1390 (11 vols.). Here is the Google-digitized volume of Hazlitt's 1824 anthology from NYPL, courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library.

Rewriting Old Zack

The previous post identified the 1847 newspaper source for Melville's physical description of Zachary Taylor in Yankee Doodle. With Melville's base-text in the New York Herald of June 30, 1847 before us, we can compare the original article with Melville's version to see exactly how Melville adapted it for comic effects. A closer look at Melville's changes may prove interesting and instructive.

Here's the author of Typee and Omoo at work, rewriting Old Zack. (The source is shown in black text; Melville's rewrite in blue.)

The hero of Buena Vista,
The hero of Buena Vista,

around whose military brow so many chaplets of fame have been thrown
upon the crown of whose caput have descended so many interleaved chaplets of fame

presents in his personal appearance many of those striking stamps of nature, which mark the gentleman and the officer.
presents in his general exterior personal appearance many of those extraordinary characteristics distinctive of the noble spirit tabernacled within.

Of an average medium height, being about five feet nine inches,
Of about the common length of ordinary mortals—say about five feet, nine inches, and two barley corns, Long Measure—

he inclines to a heaviness of frame and general well-developed muscular outline, with some tendency to corpulency; of square build, he now inclines to stoop;

he rather leans to a squat colossalness of frame and universal spread of figure, particularly on the lower part of the abdominal regions. To counteract a bulging forth of the latter parts, he is said to wear a truss of peculiar conformation. This circumstance, however, is not as yet fully established. Of a thick set and quadratular build, he now inclines to tenuity in the parts lying round about the calf.

and from the great equestrian exercise the nature of his life has led him necessarily to undergo, his inferior extremities are somewhat bowed.

Originally of great agility of the locomotive apparatus, he now betrays on his partially denuded head a want of energy in the capillary tubes of the hair, as his digestive machinery is liable to frequent suspensions of activity. 

His expansive chest shows him capable of undergoing that vast fatigue through which he has passed amid the hummocks and savannahs of Florida, and the still more recent fields of Mexico.

His broad and expanded chest shows the hero fully capable of encountering the prodigious fatigues of war, whether in the interminably interlocked everglades of the Floridian southerly terminus of the Republic, or upon the wide-spreading and generally level table-land savannahs of Mexico.

His face is expressive of great determination—

His face is a physignomical phenomenon, which Lavater would have crossed the Atlantic to contemplate. Of soul-awing determination of expression and significant of inflexible and immovable ironness of purpose,

yet, still so softened by the kindlier feelings of the soul, as to render the perfect stranger prepossessed in his behalf.

it (the external features of the countenance) are softened down and melted into a kindly benevolence which would prepossess a perfect stranger in his favor.

His head is large, well-developed in the anterior regions,

His head is large, extremely well dev[el]oped in the frontal quarter, but not classically elegant in the anterior portion. To employ an expressive, though somewhat rude comparison, it appears as if squshed between his shoulders. By close observers, the lobe of the right ear is thought to be depressed more than the corresponding auricular organ, on the lateral part of the caput. 

and covered with a moderate quantity of hair, now tinged by the coloring pencil of time, which he wears parted on one side, and brushed down.

In early adolescence of a beautiful amber or brown color, the hair, through the gradual ravages of time, has assumed a speckled, pepper and salt external appearance. In a most touching manner the thin and scattered locks are parted picturesquely on one side and combed slickly over the brows.

His eyebrows are heavy, and extend over the optic orbit; the eye grey, full of fire, and expressive when his mental powers are called into play, yet reposing as if in pleasant quiet, when in ordinary.—

The latter are Jupiternian in their awful bushiness—the hairy appendage curling over upon the optic orbits. His frown is Olympian and strikes terror and confusion into the overwhelmed soul of the spectator. The muscular energy of the brows is truly extraordinary. When ever their pupular is under mental excitation, they frequently become knit together in wrinkular pleats like unto the foldular developments under the lateral shoulder of the rhinoceros species of animated nature. His eye is Websternian, though grey. The left organ somewhat effects the dexter side of the socket, while examined by a powerful telescope several minute specks are observable in the pupil of the sinister orbit. But this detracts not from the majesty of its expression: the sun even has its spots. When the hero's soul is lashed into intellectual agitation by the external occurrence of irritating and stimulating circumstance, the eye assumes an inflamed and fiery appearance. The scantiness of the lashes and their short and singed appearance are ascribable, perhaps, to their vicinity to the pupil when thus kindled into fury. When a mental calm, however, pervades the serene soul of the hero, a Saucernian placidity is diffused over the entire visionary orb. 

His nose is straight, neither partaking of the true Grecian nor Roman order; his lips thin, the upper firm, and the lower slightly projecting.

The nostrilian organ, or proboscis. is straight, but neither inclining to the Roman, or Grecian, or, indeed, the Doric or Composite order of nasal architecture. 

The outline of his face is oval, the skin wrinkled, and deeply embrowned by the many tropical suns to which he has been exposed.

The labial appendages (suspended just under the proboscis) are attenuated—the upper tightly and firmly spread upon the dental parts beneath; and the lower pendant and projecting as represented in the prints. The outline of the caput, generally, is an ovalular elipsis inclining to the rotund, but having no predisposition to the quadrangular. The obvious cuticle or scarf-skin is wrinkled, freckled, and embrowned—doubtless through age and constant exposure to the ardent rays of the Floridian and Mexicanian sun combined. 

His manners are frank, social, and no one ever left his company, without feeling that he had been mingling with a gentleman of the true olden times.

The manner of the hero is frank and companionable—and never did mortal leave his society without being constantly impressed with the unavoidable conviction that he had been conversing with a good fellow and a gentleman. 

He at times appears in deep meditation, and is then not always accessible. In his military discipline he is firm, and expects all orders emanating from his office to be rigidly enforced and observed —

At times he is seen in deep and earnest meditation—the left auricular organ with the head attached thereto, deposited upon the open palm and outspread digits of the manual termination of the arm. At other times he assumes when meditating quite a different posture; the fore finger of the left hand being placed on the dexter side of the proboscis. In his military discipline, he is firm and unyielding to the last degree of military inflexibility—

treating his men not as helots or slaves, but exercising only that command which is necessary for the good of the whole. To the younger officers under him, he is peculiarly lenient — often treating their little faults more with a father's forgiveness, than with the judgment of a ruler.

but is, nevertheless, remarkably lenient to those under him, officers and privates included. Particularly to the youthful portion of his command, whom he treats with all the indulgence of a paternal relative or guardian—often permitting them to lay a-bed late in the morning, when the battle is raging at the fiercest.  

In his general toilet he does not imitate the Beau Brummels and band-box dandies of the present fashionable epoch, but apparels his person in unison with his age, and has no great predilection for the uniform.

In his general toilet he is far from imitating a Brummellian precision and starchedness of cravat. 

In this, however, he is by no means peculiar, for a majority of our regular military gentlemen seldom appear in their externals on duty; and the stations to which General Taylor has been assigned, have been in the warm and sunny south, rendering the heavy blue cloth undress coat disagreeable to the physical feelings.

He has no violent predilection for his regimentals and seldom appears in them, which, in fact, is the case with most of his officers, of whom it is even observed, that “they seldom appear in externals on duty,”—a habit indicative of superiority to foppish adornments, but might be construed by the fastidious into a want of good taste and decorousness. Their custom in this respect, however, is defensible upon the ground, that called by Divine Providence to perform their martial functions in the genial and delightful regions of the sunny south, the cumbersome military costume, or, indeed, any dress at all, “is disagreeable to the physical feelings."

I have generally seen him in a pair of grey trowsers,

The hero himself may be usually seen by an ordinary spectator arrayed in a pair of sheep's grey pants, shapeless and inclined to bagging—the latter predisposition being imputed, by a reflecting observer, to the singular fact that the hero never wears the common-place articles called suspenders.

a dark vest, and either a brown or speckled frock coat, reaching lower than would suit the starched and prim bucks of modern civilization. 

His coat is generally of a brownish tinge which in some cases is to be imputed to the original color imparted to the cloth when in the vat of the dyer, and in other cases to an heroic disregard of dust and oleaginous spots on the part of the ungent wearer. His vest usually, though not invariably, is of a darksome hue—resembling the ordinary sable. 

He wears a long black silk neck-handkerchief, the knot not looking as if he had been torturing himself to arrange it before a full-length mirror;

He wears a long crumpled black silk neck-handkerchief, much knotted and super-twisted, and evidently not put on with any great degree of care. But the carelessness with which it is tied in no respect approaches to the studied artlessness of the Byronic bow. The shirt collar is open, revealing considerable superfluous hair just above region of the thorax and windpipe, and betokening a disdain of Gouraud's Depillatory. Several individual hairs partake of the greyish tinge of the sparse covering of the head. 

he sometimes wears a white hat, resembling in shape those used by our flat-boatmen,

The hero sometimes wears a white wool hat, much marked by indentation, and irregular depressions and prominences upon the crown. It resembles in most respects the castor of a Mississippi flat-boatman.—

and a pair of common soldier shoes, not much polished.

His shoes are the common cow-hide sandals served out by the Commissary Departmtent to the free use of the army. They are usually stringless and not much polished.

For further study:

• New York Herald - June 30, 1847
• Yankee Doodle No. 44 - August 7, 1844
• Luther Stearns Mansfield, "Melville's Comic Articles on Zachary Taylor" in
  American Literature 9 (January 1938): 411-418

Gouraud Bottle via Hair Raising Stories

Related posts

• Personal appearance of Zachary Taylor 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/07/personal-appearance-of-zachary-taylor.html 

• Melville's Old Zack anecdotes in YANKEE DOODLE and some newspapers
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/04/melvilles-old-zack-anecdotes-in-yankee.html

• Yankee Doodle, borrowed by Walter Blair
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/05/yankee-doodle-borrowed-by-walter-blair.html

Personal appearance of Zachary Taylor, Melville's 1847 sketch and newspaper source

Major General Zachary Taylor
 The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Published in Yankee Doodle on August 7, 1847, Herman Melville's humorous sketch of the personal appearance of General Taylor directly parodies a newspaper report that first appeared in the New York Herald on June 30, 1847.

The New York Herald - June 30, 1847
via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers - Library of Congress

The Herald sketch circulated widely under various titles, including "Personal Appearance of Gen. Taylor" in the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer (July 13, 1847); and "General Taylor's Personal Appearance" in The Anglo-American (July 17, 1847).

In his Yankee Doodle piece, Melville essentially rewrote the Herald article, embracing much of the descriptive language while crafting a comically exaggerated pose of pseudo-scientific seriousness. In many places Melville borrowed verbatim from his newspaper source. For example, two phrases from one or another version of the newspaper article on Zachary Taylor's personal appearance are amusingly quoted and italicized in Melville's Yankee Doodle parody. Officers

"seldom appear in their externals on duty" 

since in the hot climate of Mexico the heavy military uniform would soon become

"disagreeable to the physical feelings."

In recasting the quoted material, Melville exaggerates the informality of camp life, implying that officers wage war in their underwear. Melville's source and sketch both compare General Taylor's hat to those of "flat-boatmen." Both end by describing the General's shoes as "not much polished."

Melville's newspaper source and his unsigned parody in Yankee Doodle are transcribed below. First, the source:

Personal Appearance of Gen. Taylor.— One of the returned volunteers who fought under Gen. Taylor at Monterey, has furnished us with a leaf of his diary, describing the personal appearance and manners of the great hero, as follows:

The hero of Buena Vista, around whose military brow so many chaplets of fame have been thrown, presents in his personal appearance many of those striking stamps of nature, which mark the gentleman and the officer. Of an average medium height, being about five feet nine inches, he inclines to a heaviness of frame and general well- developed muscular outline, with some tendency to corpulency; of square build, he now inclines to stoop; and from the great equestrian exercise the nature of his life has led him necessarily to undergo, his inferior extremities are somewhat bowed. His expansive chest shows him capable of undergoing that vast fatigue through which he has passed amid the hummocks and savannahs of Florida, and the still more recent fields of Mexico. His face is expressive of great determination—yet, still so softened by the kindlier feelings of the soul, as to render the perfect stranger prepossessed in his behalf. His head is large, well-developed in the anterior regions, and covered with a moderate quantity of hair, now tinged by the coloring pencil of time, which he wears parted on one side, and brushed down. His eyebrows are heavy, and extend over the optic orbit; the eye grey, full of fire, and expressive when his mental powers are called into play, yet reposing as if in pleasant quiet, when in ordinary.— His nose is straight, neither partaking of the true Grecian nor Roman order; his lips thin, the upper firm, and the lower slightly projecting. The outline of his face is oval, the skin wrinkled, and deeply embrowned by the many tropical suns to which he has been exposed. His manners are frank, social, and no one ever left his company, without feeling that he had been mingling with a gentleman of the true olden times. He at times appears in deep meditation, and is then not always accessible. In his military discipline he is firm, and expects all orders emanating from his office to be rigidly enforced and observed — treating his men not as helots or slaves, but exercising only that command which is necessary for the good of the whole. To the younger officers under him, he is peculiarly lenient — often treating their little faults more with a father's forgiveness, than with the judgment of a ruler. In his general toilet he does not imitate the Beau Brummels and band-box dandies of the present fashionable epoch, but apparels his person in unison with his age, and has no great predilection for the uniform. In this, however, he is by no means peculiar, for a majority of our regular military gentlemen seldom appear in their externals on duty; and the stations to which General Taylor has been assigned, have been in the warm and sunny south, rendering the heavy blue cloth undress coat disagreeable to the physical feelings. I have generally seen him in a pair of grey trowsers, a dark vest, and either a brown or speckled frock coat, reaching lower than would suit the starched and prim bucks of modern civilization. He wears a long black silk neck-handkerchief, the knot not looking as if he had been torturing himself to arrange it before a full-length mirror; he sometimes wears a white hat, resembling in shape those used by our flat-boatmen, and a pair of common soldier shoes, not much polished."  --Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, July 13, 1847

Reprinted many times for example:

• Alexandria [Virginia] Gazette, July 5, 1847
• New York Evening Mirror, July 13, 1847
• Litchfield [Connecticut] Republican, July 15, 1847
• Auburn [New York] Daily Advertiser, July 16, 1847
• The Anglo-American vol. 9 - July 17, 1847
• Rochester [New York] Daily Democrat, July 19, 1847 
• Saratoga Springs, New York Daily Saratoga Republican, July 22, 1847 
• Greenfield [Massachusetts] Gazette & Courier, July 27, 1847
• Raleigh [North Carolina] Register, July 28, 1847
• The Taylor Text-Book or Rough and Ready Reckoner - 1848 

Found on Newspapers.com

Now for the parody. Here is the text of Melville's sketch, transcribed from Yankee Doodle no. 44 (August 7, 1847):

"GEN. TAYLOR'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE," OR OLD ZACK PHYSIOLOGICALLY AND OTHERWISE CONSIDERED.

BY A SURGEON OF THE ARMY IN MEXICO.

The hero of Buena Vista, upon the crown of whose caput have descended so many interleaved chaplets of fame, presents in his general exterior personal appearance many of those extraordinary characteristics distinctive of the noble spirit tabernacled within. Of about the common length of ordinary mortals—say about five feet, nine inches, and two barley corns, Long Measure—he rather leans to a squat colossalness of frame and universal spread of figure, particularly on the lower part of the abdominal regions. To counteract a bulging forth of the latter parts, he is said to wear a truss of peculiar conformation. This circumstance, however, is not as yet fully established. Of a thick set and quadratular build, he now inclines to tenuity in the parts lying round about the calf. Originally of great agility of the locomotive apparatus, he now betrays on his partially denuded head a want of energy in the capillary tubes of the hair, as his digestive machinery is liable to frequent suspensions of activity. 

His broad and expanded chest shows the hero fully capable of encountering the prodigious fatigues of war, whether in the interminably interlocked everglades of the Floridian southerly terminus of the Republic, or upon the wide-spreading and generally level table-land savannahs of Mexico. His face is a physignomical phenomenon, which Lavater would have crossed the Atlantic to contemplate. Of soul-awing determination of expression and significant of inflexible and immovable ironness of purpose, it (the external features of the countenance) are softened down and melted into a kindly benevolence which would prepossess a perfect stranger in his favor. His head is large, extremely well dev[el]oped in the frontal quarter, but not classically elegant in the anterior portion. To employ an expressive, though somewhat rude comparison, it appears as if squshed between his shoulders. By close observers, the lobe of the right ear is thought to be depressed more than the corresponding auricular organ, on the lateral part of the caput.  

In early adolescence of a beautiful amber or brown color, the hair, through the gradual ravages of time, has assumed a speckled, pepper and salt external appearance. In a most touching manner the thin and scattered locks are parted picturesquely on one side and combed slickly over the brows. The latter are Jupiternian in their awful bushiness—the hairy appendage curling over upon the optic orbits. His frown is Olympian and strikes terror and confusion into the overwhelmed soul of the spectator. The muscular energy of the brows is truly extraordinary. When ever their pupular is under mental excitation, they frequently become knit together in wrinkular pleats like unto the foldular developments under the lateral shoulder of the rhinoceros species of animated nature. His eye is Websternian, though grey. The left organ somewhat effects the dexter side of the socket, while examined by a powerful telescope several minute specks are observable in the pupil of the sinister orbit. But this detracts not from the majesty of its expression: the sun even has its spots. When the hero's soul is lashed into intellectual agitation by the external occurrence of irritating and stimulating circumstance, the eye assumes an inflamed and fiery appearance. The scantiness of the lashes and their short and singed appearance are ascribable, perhaps, to their vicinity to the pupil when thus kindled into fury. When a mental calm, however, pervades the serene soul of the hero, a Saucernian placidity is diffused over the entire visionary orb.  

The nostrilian organ, or proboscis. is straight, but neither inclining to the Roman, or Grecian, or, indeed, the Doric or Composite order of nasal architecture. The labial appendages (suspended just under the proboscis) are attenuated—the upper tightly and firmly spread upon the dental parts beneath; and the lower pendant and projecting as represented in the prints. The outline of the caput, generally, is an ovalular elipsis inclining to the rotund, but having no predisposition to the quadrangular. The obvious cuticle or scarf-skin is wrinkled, freckled, and embrowned—doubtless through age and constant exposure to the ardent rays of the Floridian and Mexicanian sun combined.  

The manner of the hero is frank and companionable—and never did mortal leave his society without being constantly impressed with the unavoidable conviction that he had been conversing with a good fellow and a gentleman. 

At times he is seen in deep and earnest meditation—the left auricular organ with the head attached thereto, deposited upon the open palm and outspread digits of the manual termination of the arm. At other times he assumes when meditating quite a different posture; the fore finger of the left hand being placed on the dexter side of the proboscis. In his military discipline, he is firm and unyielding to the last degree of military inflexibility—but is, nevertheless, remarkably lenient to those under him, officers and privates included. Particularly to the youthful portion of his command, whom he treats with all the indulgence of a paternal relative or guardian—often permitting them to lay a-bed late in the morning, when the battle is raging at the fiercest.  

In his general toilet he is far from imitating a Brummellian precision and starchedness of cravat. He has no violent predilection for his regimentals and seldom appears in them, which, in fact, is the case with most of his officers, of whom it is even observed, that “they seldom appear in externals on duty,”—a habit indicative of superiority to foppish adornments, but might be construed by the fastidious into a want of good taste and decorousness. 

Their custom in this respect, however, is defensible upon the ground, that called by Divine Providence to perform their martial functions in the genial and delightful regions of the sunny south, the cumbersome military costume, or, indeed, any dress at all, “is disagreeable to the physical feelings." 

The hero himself may be usually seen by an ordinary spectator arrayed in a pair of sheep's grey pants, shapeless and inclined to bagging—the latter predisposition being imputed, by a reflecting observer, to the singular fact that the hero never wears the common-place articles called suspenders. His coat is generally of a brownish tinge which in some cases is to be imputed to the original color imparted to the cloth when in the vat of the dyer, and in other cases to an heroic disregard of dust and oleaginous spots on the part of the ungent wearer. His vest usually, though not invariably, is of a darksome hue—resembling the ordinary sable. He wears a long crumpled black silk neck-handkerchief, much knotted and super-twisted, and evidently not put on with any great degree of care. But the carelessness with which it is tied in no respect approaches to the studied artlessness of the Byronic bow. The shirt collar is open, revealing considerable superfluous hair just above region of the thorax and windpipe, and betokening a disdain of Gouraud's Depillatory. Several individual hairs partake of the greyish tinge of the sparse covering of the head. 

The hero sometimes wears a white wool hat, much marked by indentation, and irregular depressions and prominences upon the crown. It resembles in most respects the castor of a Mississippi flat-boatman.— His shoes are the common cow-hide sandals served out by the Commissary Departmtent to the free use of the army. They are usually stringless and not much polished. 

--[Herman Melville] in Yankee Doodle No. 44 - August 7, 1844

In print, texts of this sketch and nine numbered "Old Zack" Anecdotes are available in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860. The University of Chicago volume with Yankee Doodle, Volumes 1-2 has been digitized by Google Books, and is also available online courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Related posts

• Re-writing Old Zack
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/07/rewriting-old-zack.html

• Melville's Old Zack Anecdotes
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/04/melvilles-old-zack-anecdotes-in-yankee.html