which vs. type, and recursion?

[Richard Hector <richard@walnut.gen.nz>]

Greg Wooledge pointed out in another thread that 'type' is often better 
than 'which' for finding out what kind of command you're about to run, 
and where it comes from.

A quick test, however, threw up another issue:

richard@zircon:~$ type ls
ls is aliased to `ls --color=auto'

Great, so it's an alias. But what is the underlying ls? How do I find 
out? I did find out, by unaliasing ls and trying again, which showed 
that it's an actual executable, /usr/bin/ls, and not a shell builtin.

But is there an easier/better way? Can 'type' be asked to recursively 
decode aliases?

I looked at the relevant section of bash(1) (when I eventually found 
it), but was not particularly enlightened.

Cheers,
Richard