Dr. Morin, advancing far in age, was now forced to take a servant, and, what was yet a more essential alteration, prevailed upon himself to take an ounce of wine a day, which he measured with the same exactness as a medicine bordering upon poison.  He quitted, at the same time, all his practice in the city, and confined it to the poor of his neighbourhood, and his visits to the Hotel-Dieu; but his weakness increasing, he was forced to increase his quantity of wine, which yet he always continued to adjust by weight [48].

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!