the final cessation of the storm. Meanwhile, our condition and prospects grow worse and worse. The roads are in such a state that wagons are eight days making the journey from Stevenson to Chattanooga, and some which left on the 10th have not yet arrived. Though subsistence stores are son nearly exhausted here, the wagons are compelled to throw overboard portions of their precious cargo in order to get through at all. The returning trains have now for some days been stopped on this side of the Sequatchie, and a civilian who reached here last night states that he saw fully five hundred teams halted between the mountain and the river, without forage for the animals and unable to move in any direction.

I rode through the camps here yesterday, and can testify that my previous reports respecting the starvation of the battery horses were not exaggerated. A few days more and most of them will be dead. If the effort which Rosecrans intends to make to open the river should be futile, the immediate retreat of this army will follow. It does not seem possible to hold out here another week without a new avenue of supplies. General Smith says that as he passed among the men working on the fortifications yesterday several shouted "crackers" at him.

Amid all this, the practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious, and it is difficult for any one to get anything done.

The pontoon bridge broken three days ago is not yet replaced, though every part is ready to be laid. The telegraph is broken by our pioneers as fast as it is re-established, and the steamboat is rendered useless by the carelessness or wantonness of her crew, while the work on the fortifications is carried on so slowly that they might as well be abandoned; and if the army is finally obliged to retreat, the probability is that it will fall back like a rabble, leaving its artillery, and protected only by the river behind it. If, on the other hand, we regain control of the river and keep it, subsistence and forage can be got here, and we may escape with no worse misfortune than the loss of 12,000 animals.

[C. A. DANA.]

Honorable E. M. STANTON,

[Secretary of War.]

Numbers 7.

Report of Surg. Glover Perin, U. S. Army, Medical Director, Department of the Cumberland.

HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF THE CUMBERLAND, MEDICAL DIRECTOR'S OFFICE,
Chattanooga, February -, 1864.

SIR: I have the honor to transmit herewith a nominal list* of the wounded at the battle of Chickamauga, together with report from the medical directors of the corps, giving brief accounts of such points as relate to the operations of the medical department.

In this place I would beg leave to review briefly the medical history of the movement which led to the great battle of Chickamauga,

---------------

*Embodied in revised statement, p.171.

---------------