an operation should be performed, making due
allowance for atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he then
studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the elements
contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to man who absorbs
them, deriving from them a particular expression of life? Did he work
it all out by the power of deduction and analogy, to which we owe the
genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may, this man was in all the secrets of
the human frame; he knew it in the past and in the future, emphasizing
the present.

But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did
and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds?
No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of
human chemistry possessed that antique science of the Mages, that is
to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life
antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it
_is_, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was
purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is
now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue
to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own
cost.

But perhaps Desplein's genius was answerable for his beliefs, and for
that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative
envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not being
able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would
not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither in the
antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no
doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like
that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible
atheists--atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible.
This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed
from his youth to dissect the creature above all others--before, during,
and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the
individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. When he
detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre, and a centre for aerating
the blood--the first two so perfectly complementary that in the latter
years of his life he came to a conviction that the sense of hearing is
not absolute