It will be noted that in this and the chapters immediately following it, the Editor has supplied material freely. The obvious interpretation is that satisfactory material covering the desired ground was not found in any of the essays; for we are sure the scope and number of the credited excerpts will make it clear that all contributions were adequately scrutinized in search of available passages. This "inadequacy" of the competing essays has been severely commented upon by several correspondents, and the inference drawn that as a whole the offerings were not up to the mark. Such a viewpoint is wholly unjust to the contestants. The essays which paid serious attention to the business of paving the way to relativity necessarily did so at the expense of completeness in the later paragraphs where specific explanation of the Einstein theories was in order. Mr. Law, whose essay was by all means the best of those that gave much space to introductory remarks, found himself left with only 600 words in which to tell what it was that he had been introducing. The majority of the contestants appear to have faced the same question as to subject matter which the Judges faced, and to have reached the same decision. They accordingly devoted their attention toward the prize, rather than toward the production of an essay that would best supplement that of the winner. It is for this very reason that, in these preliminary chapters, so large a proportion of the material has had to be supplied by the Editor; and this very circumstance is a tribute to the good judgment of the competitors, rather than ground for criticism of their work. The general introduction of Chapter II. out of the way, Chapters III. and IV. take up the business of leading the reader into the actual subject of relativity. The subject is here developed in what may be called the historical order--the order in which it took form in Einstein's own mind. Both in and outside the contest of which this book is the outcome, a majority of those who have written on relativity have followed this order, which is indeed a very natural one and one well calculated to give to the rather surprising assumptions of relativity a reasonableness which they might well appear to the lay mind to lack if laid down more arbitrarily. In these two chapters no effort is made to carry the argument beyond the formulation of the Special Principle of the relativity of uniform motion, but this principle is developed in considerably more detail than would be the case if it were left entirely to the competing essayists. The reason for this is again that we are dealing with a phase of the subject which is of subordinate importance so far as a complete statement of the General Theory of Relativity is concerned, but which is of the greatest significance in connection with the effort of the layman to acquire the proper preliminary orientation toward the larger subject.