In one of his essays, Stephen Jay Gould notes 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 called partula in Polynesia. 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. A single line of text in a Crampton table could represent weeks of measurement and calculation.in Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'
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