Just at present our prospects (viz., evening of July 3) are looking badly enough. McClellan has clearly been overmatched and driven to the wall, after very obstinate fighting, with very heavy loss on both sides. Whether it is retrievable with reinforcements, or whether the whole campaign has to be begun again against Richmond, is not yet clear. Anyway we have got to put shoulder to the wheel anew, and it may be done, we suppose, more easily and far more promptly than last year. All we ask is that Europe shall let us alone. Enough for to-day. PROVIDENCE, R. I., July 29, 1862. No more news in the orchids line. I am making two or three days of holiday, and yesterday I found a few specimens of Gymnadenia tridentata. But the flowers are too small to examine well with a hand lens. If they keep, I will take them back to Cambridge in a day or two and see what to make of them.... As to the country, you will see by this time that we have not the least idea of abandoning the struggle. We have learned only that there is no use trying any longer to pick up our eggs gently, very careful not to break any. The South forces us at length to do what it would have been more humane to have done from the first, i. e., to act with vigor, not to say rigor. We shall be complained of for our savageness, no doubt, whereas we feel that our error has been all the other way. But the independence, the total indifference to English feeling which you recommended last year, has come at length; now we care nothing what Mrs. Grundy says. CAMBRIDGE, September 22, 1862. Your pleasant epistles of August 21 and September 4 are to be acknowledged, with thanks. But I have nothing in particular to communicate, except our hearty congratulations that your boy and Mrs. Darwin are recovering so well. Tell Leonard that I was pleased both with his attention in writing and with the ocular proof of his convalescence in his being able so soon to use a pen. His requests shall be kept in view; the five-cent stamp I send now; dare say I shall sometime pick up the thirty and ninety, though I never saw the latter, nor the twelve, twenty, and twenty-four on envelopes (the twenty-four cent he must have already, as it is often used on my envelopes to you). Bravo for Horace, whose illustration of Natural Selection as to the adders is capital. A chip of the old block, he evidently is. I told you that Rothrock had gone to the war, and perhaps has already been under fire; probably not. I had intended that next spring he should do up Houstonia more perfectly, and work up this and some related matters for his thesis when he comes up for examination. But all this is broken up by his enlistment....