founded in that year, 1887, the great Physical-Technical Institute, and presented it to the German nation; Helmholtz was its first president. The modern science of radiation rests upon a foundation first laid by Kirchhoff and greatly strengthened by additional experimental data obtained in this institute under the guidance of Helmholtz. Planck, the successor of Kirchhoff at the University of Berlin, already in office before I left Berlin, was undoubtedly inspired by these experiments when he formulated his great law of radiation which forms to-day the last word in the science of radiation, a great science which justly bears the mark “made in Germany,” just as the electromagnetic theory bears the mark “made in England.” The Physical-Technical Institute will always stand as a memorial to the man who preached in Germany the doctrine of the closest co-operation between abstract science and the industries. Germany adopted it first; the United States adopted it many years later. Helmholtz and Siemens always represented to me the highest symbol of this co-operation. Bismarck and Moltke, Helmholtz and Siemens, were the great power which the young German eagle had discovered in his pinions; and he flew as he had never flown before, and his flight astonished me when I was a student in Berlin. He who wants to know the real Germany of the eighties should study the lives of Bismarck and Moltke, of Helmholtz and Siemens. They, I firmly believed at that time, were the leaders of the German constructive thought and action; they were the fathers of united Germany just as Washington and Hamilton, Franklin and Jefferson, were the fathers of this country. But would the spiritual influence of the fathers of united Germany produce a German Lincoln? I knew the historical background of the Declaration of Independence and also its historical foreground too well to answer this question in the affirmative. Extraordinary men can do extraordinary things, but the course of a nation’s destiny will always be guided not by transient efforts of one or even of several extraordinary men of a given period, but by the persistent power of the nation’s traditions.