Bryson completes the tale of the expedition, thus bookending Newton’s theory in a tangible human story, once again using humor and irony to render ideas (here, about Earth’s shape and circumference) more memorable. The grueling nature of such expeditions emphasizes that early scientific discovery is fraught with obstacles. Bryson thus implies that one of the reasons why scientific knowledge is still in its infancy is because it simply takes a lot of effort to learn things about the world in this stage of history.