10 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF BECLARD. 



sidered it in its relations with Medicine and Surgery. He 

 consecrated the whole of his time to the study of the relations 

 of the parts with each other, to the varieties of forms and di- 

 rections that circumstances may cause them to experience; 

 and not being able to find, in the immense number of facts 

 which he daily observed, means sufficiently vast to multiply 

 his learning, he was seen thirsting for more knowledge, to 

 extend beyond conception the limits of his erudition. Full 

 of admiration for the German school of medicine, to which 

 we owe so many valuable discoveries in the science of orga- 

 nization, he early familiarized himself with the labours of 

 Meckel, Oken, Tiedemann, &c. He also profited by the dis- 

 coveries of the celebrated men of Great Britain and Italy ; 

 and it was not until he was possessor of an immense mass of 

 facts gathered, so to say, from every quarter of the civilized 

 world, that he minutely and carefully scrutinized, aided by 

 his vast experience, every fact, every opinion, and every 

 theory. 



Some men, envious of his glory, accused him of being a 

 mere compiler, a man of erudition, but denied that he pos- 

 sessed even the smallest particle of genius. Let us not forget, 

 therefore, that in following this course, and in fulfilling so 

 difficult a task, Beclard needed to possess a correct and rapid 

 intellect, an uncommon eclectic mind, and a very superior 

 power of reasoning. The parallel that some persons have 

 tried to establish, between Bichat and Beclard, can not really 

 exist. If these two men have between them some resem- 

 blance as to their early and rapidly acquired glory, and unex- 

 pected and premature end, they essentially differ as to the 

 manner in which they cultivated that science they have 

 equally improved. Rich with his own native genius, carried 

 along by the desire of constructing the medical edifice on a 

 new plan, Bichat hastened to arrange the materials for 

 which he was almost entirely indebted to his own researches. 

 B6clard, on the contrary, formed in his mind the vast project 

 of collecting all the scattered facts belonging to the science, 

 in order to create with them a code of doctrines authorized 

 by the most celebrated names, and supported by the result of 



