Bulletin of the New Yoek Mathematical Society Inaugural Address Delivered at the General Session of the Congress of Mathe-

T H E German Government has commissioned me to communicate to this Congress the assurances of its good-will, and to participate in your transactions. In this official capacity allow me to repeat here the invitation given already in the general session to visit at some convenient time the German university exhibit in the Liberal Arts Building. I have also the honor to lay before you a considerable number of mathematical papers, which give collectively a fairly complete account of contemporaneous mathematical activity in Germany. Reserving for the mathematical section a detailed summary of these papers, I mention here only certain points of more general interest. When we contemplate the development of mathematics in this nineteenth century, we find something similar to what has taken place in other sciences. The famous investigators of the preceding period, Lagrange, Laplace, Gauss, were each great enough to embrace all branches of mathematics and its applications. In particular, astronomy and mathematics were in their time regarded as inseparable. With the succeeding generation, however, the tendency to specialization manifested itself. Not unworthy are the names of its early representatives : Abel, Jacobi, Galois, and the great geometers from Poncelet on, and not inconsiderable are their individual achievements. But along with its rapidly growing development the science departed more and more from