6 Biographical Memoir of M. Halle. 



at the College of France, in which he, as it were, shewed the 

 other side of the picture of medical science, where the economy 

 is viewed in its intimate changes ; and physical considerations 

 must almost always be in a great measure renounced. He took 

 for his subject the history of experience in medicine, from the 

 first written monuments of the art, and began his course with an 

 interpretation of the works of Hippocrates, not that he, like so 

 many moderns, by whom they have been scarcely understood, 

 wished to exhibit them pedantically, as collections of infallible 

 oracles, to which nothing could be added, and from which no- 

 thing could be taken away ; but because he saw in them the first 

 attempts of genius to reduce to rules an order of facts which 

 seem to consist only of exceptions, and because the just and 

 profound views which, notwithstanding some errors, are in these 

 works, in so great number, excite the higher admiration from 

 having been formed at a period when all was unknown beyond 

 what is evident from the immediate observation of diseases. 



An intimate acquaintance with the Greek language, and assi- 

 duous study of the philosophers and physicians of antiquity, 

 had suggested to him happy explanations of several obscure 

 passages in the Father of Medicine ; and it is much to be regret- 

 ted that neither his notes, nor those of his auditors, have been 

 found sufficiently ample for the reproduction of this course, at 

 least in its principal articles, as has been done with respect to 

 his course on the study of health. 



His design was to follow the progress of observation in all 

 ages, to shew how new facts have led to more correct general 

 principles, and how, on the other hand, science has almost always 

 been retarded by systems. It was a kind of experimental logic, 

 in which he exercised his pupils, and they could have had no 

 better master than he who, from his childhood, had been so dis- 

 tinguished by his sound judgment. 



Nothing was wanting in M. Halle as to knowledge to make 

 him an excellent professor. He was thoroughly versed in all 

 the accessory sciences, and had read in their original language 

 the works of all the great physicians. His own experience was 

 immense, and directed according to the surest method ; but it 

 is not generally at the age of forty that one can acquire the fa- 

 cility of elocution indispensable to fix the attention of a nume- 



