started which was organized as the Philharmonic Society in 1880. There was not room enough in Boston for two orchestras, but there was room and need for one good orchestra which would cater fully to the city's musical tastes. Such an orchestra needs a sponsor in the shape of heavy financial backing and the _deus ex machina_ in this case was Henry L. Higginson, the banker, who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra at his own risk and guaranteed its permanency. Under the leadership of George Henschel the orchestra opened its first season in 1881 with Beethoven's 'Dedication of the House.' It gave twenty concerts that season and twenty-six in the third season. Since then the regular number has been twenty-four, in addition to public rehearsals. Regular visits are made to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Providence, and other large cities, bringing the total number of concerts each season to the neighborhood of one hundred. George Henschel returned to Europe in 1884 and Wilhelm Gericke came over from Vienna as conductor. To Gericke must be awarded the chief credit for making the Boston Symphony Orchestra what it is to-day--the finest in America and one of the most perfectly balanced and finished symphonic ensembles in the world. Gericke was a disciplinarian of the most rigid type and under his iron rule practically all the technical weaknesses of the orchestra were eliminated. Musically, like Theodore Thomas, he was an ardent devotee of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and he was more concerned with strictly traditional interpretations of the classics than with incursions into new and untried fields. Just as Thomas in New York had an ideally suitable successor in Anton Seidl, so Gericke had an ideally suitable successor in that remarkable orchestral virtuoso, Arthur Nikisch. Perhaps musical America has never known anything like the four seasons during which the temperamental and fiery Nikisch performed on the perfect instrument which Gericke had left to his hand. He was succeeded by Emil Paur, a decided modernist in his tendencies, who made Boston familiar with Tschaikowsky, Richard Strauss, and lesser post-Wagnerians. Gericke returned in 1898 and in the following year Symphony Hall was built. Max Fiedler was the next conductor, and after him came the present incumbent of the post--the scholarly and immaculate Dr. Karl Muck. III