앎에 헌신

What is nearly always most arresting in any ramble through the scattered disciplines of modern science is realizing how many people have been willing to devote lifetime to the most sumptuously esoteric lines of inquiry. In one of his essays, Stephen Jay Gould note how a hero of his named Henry Edward Crampton spent fifty years, from 1906 to his death in 1956, quietly studying a genus of land snails in Polynesia called Partula. Over and over, year after year, Crampton measured to the tiniest degree---to eight decimal places---the whorls and arcs and gentle curves of numberless Partula, compiling the results into fastidiously detailed tables.

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Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 369