DEAR FRIEND,--That I ought to have replied to your letter of the 19th November, to say nothing of that of September 21 and June 18, there is no doubt. The letter I have carried in my pocket a good while, hoping to catch a moment somewhere and some time to write to you, especially as the time approaches in which I may be sending a parcel to New Orleans for you. But I have not had an hour’s leisure not demanded by letters of immediate pressing consequence, or in which I was not too tired to write. There are many correspondents whom I have neglected almost as much as I have you. I have worked like a dog, but my work laid out to be finished last July is not done yet. But from about the time of your last letter a providential dispensation has prevented me from doing what I would, namely, the sickness, by typhoid fever, of a beloved brother (a Junior in college here), who required every leisure moment from the time he became seriously sick up to the 9th inst.--a week ago--when it pleased the Sovereign Disposer of events, to whom I bow, to remove him to a better world; and I am but recently returned from the mournful journey to convey to the paternal home (in western New York) his mortal remains. This has somewhat interrupted the printing of the last sheets of my “Manual of North American Botany;” which, with all my efforts at condensation, has extended to almost eight hundred pages!! (12mo), including the introduction. It will be difficult to get the volume within covers. A year’s hard labor is bestowed upon it; I hope it will be useful and supply a desideratum. As a consolation for my honest faithfulness in making it tolerably thorough, and so much larger than I expected it would prove, it is now clear that I shall get nothing or next to it for my year’s labor. At the price to which it must be kept to get it into our schools, etc., there is so little to be made by it, that I cannot induce a publisher to pay the heavy bills, except upon terms which swallow up all the proceeds; or at the very least I may get $200, if it all sells, a year or two hence. Meanwhile, I have paid the expenses principally incurred on the first volume of “Illustrated Genera,” which I can’t print and finish till the “Manual” is out; have run heavily into debt in respect to these works, which were merely a labor of love for the good of the science and an honorable ambition; and how I am going to get through I cannot well see.... I should despond greatly if I were not of a cheerful temperament....