mine in some detail.

CURIOSITY AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY. Curiosity, the instinctive
basis of the desire to know, is the basis of scientific inquiry.
Without this fundamental desire, there could be no sustaining
motive to deep and thoroughgoing scientific research, for
theoretical investigations do not always give promise of immediate
practical benefits. The scientific interest is a development
of that restless curiosity for a knowledge of the world in
which they are living which children so markedly exhibit.
Beginning as a kind of miscellaneous and omnivorous appetite
for facts of whatever description, it grows into a desire to
understand the unsuspected and hidden relations between
facts, to penetrate to the unities discoverable beneath the
mysteries and multiplicities of things.

The scientific mood is thus in the first place a sheer instinctive
curiosity, a basic passion for facts. It is this which sustains
the scientific worker in the sometimes long and dreary
business of collecting specimens, instances, details. Many of
the most notable scientific advances, as Lord Kelvin pointed
out, must be attributed to the most protracted and unmitigated
drudgery in the collection of facts, a thoroughgoing and
trying labor in which the scientific worker could persist only
when fortified by an eager and insistent curiosity. This
"hodman's work" is the basis of the great generalizations
which constitute the framework of the modern scientific
systems. "The monotonous and quantitative work of star-cataloguing
has been continued from Hipparchus, who began
his work more than a century before Christ, work which is
continued even to the present day. This work, uninspiring
as it seems, is yet an essential basis for the applications of
astronomy, the determination of time, navigation, surveying.
Furthermore, without good star places, we can have no theory
of the motions of the solar system, and without accurate
catalogues of the stars we can know nothing of the grander
problems of the universe, the motion of our sun among the
stars, or of the stars among themselves."[1]

[Footnote 1: Hinks: _Astronomy_, p. 162.]

Not only is curiosity a sustaining motive in the drudgery of
collection and research incident and essential to scientific
generalization; it alone makes possible that suspense of
judgment which is necessary to fruitful scientific inquiry. This
suspense is, as we have already seen, difficult for most men.
Action demands i