Harry Potter and the Pedunculated Cirripede?

Merrie and I have each read Bill Bryson's "At Home" now, a mellow, pleasant meandering tour of a house (generally) and history (broadly). I don't know exactly what I'll remember from it as time goes by, beyond the multitude of small pleasures (such as learning that Thomas Jefferson brought the french fry to America... for which we apparently decided to honor him on the two-dollar bill), but there is a line offered in connection with Bryson's commentary on the slow-growing literary virtues of a pair of books which were, to be polite, underwhelming at the time (1851):

A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae, or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain,

and

The Whale.

Granted, "The Whale" would soon be republished, in a different country, with a different title - as you may surmise, yes, it became "Moby Dick" - but pedunculated cirripedes... well, let's just say that despite his best efforts over eight years of research and writing, it isn't his work on barnacles that people generally think of first when they think of Charles Darwin.

Anyway, Bryson mentions these books and says: "both reflected a fundamental change that had lately overtaken the thinking world: an almost obsessive urge to pin down every stray morsel of discernible fact and give it permanent recognition in print."

I'm not sure it's possible for a sentence to beg to be quoted on the internet more subtly yet more eagerly than that, so here it is.