Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of such
transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day almost
forgotten, will survive in his special department without crossing its
limits. For must there not be some extraordinary circumstances to exalt
the name of a professor from the history of Science to the general
history of the human race? Had Desplein that universal command of
knowledge which makes a man the living word, the great figure of his
age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer and his malady
by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled him to grasp the
diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine the very time, the
hour, the minute when 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.
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