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Morin
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At seventy-eight his legs could carry him no longer, and he scarcely left his bed; but his intellects continued unimpaired, except in the last six months of his life. He expired, or, to use a more proper term, went out, on the 1st of March, 1714, at the age of eighty years, without any distemper, and merely for want of strength, having enjoyed, by the benefit of his regimen, a long and healthy life, and a gentle and easy death.
This extraordinary regimen was but part of the daily regulation of his life, of which all the offices were carried on with a regularity and exactness nearly approaching to that of the planetary motions.
He went to bed at seven, and rose at two, throughout the year. He spent, in the morning, three hours at his devotions, and went to the Hotel-Dieu, in the summer, between five and six, and, in the winter, between six and seven, hearing mass, for the most part, at Notre Dame. After his return he read the holy scripture, dined at eleven, and, when it was fair weather, walked till two in the Royal garden, where he examined the new plants, and gratified his earliest and strongest passion. For the remaining part of the day, if he had no poor to visit, he shut himself up, and read books of literature or physick, but chiefly physick, as the duty of his profession required. This, likewise, was the time he received visits, if any were paid him. He often used this expression: “Those that come to see me, do me honour; those that stay away, do me a favour.” It is easy to conceive, that a man of this temper was not crowded with salutations: there was only now and then an Antony that would pay Paul a visit.
Among his papers was found a Greek and Latin index to Hippocrates, more copious and exact than that of Pini, which he had finished only a year before his death. Such a work required the assiduity and patience of a hermit [49]. There is, likewise, a journal of the weather, kept without interruption, for more than forty years, in which he has accurately set down the state of the barometer and thermometer, the dryness and moisture of the air, the variations of the wind in the course of the day, the rain, the thunders, and even the sudden storms, in a very commodious and concise method, which exhibits, in a little room, a great train of different observations. What numbers of such remarks had escaped a man less uniform in his life, and whose attention had been extended to common objects!
All the estate which he left is a collection of medals, another of herbs, and a library rated at two thousand crowns; which make it evident that he spent much more upon his mind than upon his body.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] Translated from an eloge by Fontenelle, and first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1741.
[48] The practice of Dr. Morin is forbidden, I believe, by every writer that has left rules for the preservation of health, and is directly opposite to that of Cornaro, who, by his regimen, repaired a broken constitution, and protracted his life, without any painful infirmities, or any decay of his intellectual abilities, to more than a hundred years; it is generally agreed that, as men advance in years, they ought to take lighter sustenance, and in less quantities; and reason seems easily to discover, that as the concoctive powers grow weaker, they ought to labour less.–Orig. Edit.
[49] This is an instance of the disposition generally found in writers of lives, to exalt every common occurrence and action into wonder. Are not indexes daily written by men, who neither receive nor expect any loud applauses for their labours?–Orig. Edit.