 Nevertheless, because of the general lack of knowledge about whales in the middle 19th century, the taxonomy in the novel provides a glimpse of the knowledge of whales by the whaling fleet and naturalists of the era.Ishmael somewhat famously asserts in the novel that the whale is a "spouting fish with a horizontal tail".He attempts a taxonomy of whales largely based on size, based on his assertion that other characteristics, such as the existence of a hump or baleen, make the classification too confusing.