Einstein's extension of his principle so as to account for gravitation was made during the war, and for a considerable period our astronomers were unable to become acquainted with it, owing to the difficulty of obtaining German printed matter. However, copies of his work ultimately reached the outside world and enabled people to learn more about it. Gravitation, ever since Newton, had remained isolated from other forces in nature; various attempts had been made to account for it, but without success. The immense unification effected by electro-magnetism apparently left gravitation out of its scope. It seemed that nature had presented a challenge to the physicists which none of them were able to meet. At this point Einstein intervened with a hypothesis which, apart altogether from subsequent verification, deserves to rank as one of the great monuments of human genius. After correcting Newton, it remained to correct Euclid, and it was in terms of non-Euclidean geometry that he stated his new theory. Non-Euclidean geometry is a study of which the primary motive was logical and philosophical; few of its promoters ever dreamed that it would come to be applied in physics. Some of Euclid's axioms were felt to be not "necessary truths," but mere empirical laws; in order to establish this view, self-consistent geometries were constructed upon assumptions other than those of Euclid. In these geometries the sum of the angles of a triangle is not two right angles, and the departure from two right angles increases as the size of the triangle increases. It is often said that in non-Euclidean geometry space has a curvature, but this way of stating the matter is misleading, since it seems to imply a fourth dimension, which is not implied by these systems. Einstein supposes that space is Euclidean where it is sufficiently remote from matter, but that the presence of matter causes it to become slightly non-Euclidean--the more matter there is in the neighborhood, the more space will depart from Euclid. By the help of this hypothesis, together with his previous theory of relativity, he deduces gravitation--very approximately, but not exactly, according to the Newtonian law of the inverse square. The minute differences between the effects deduced from his theory and those deduced from Newton are measurable in certain cases. There are, so far, three crucial tests of the relative accuracy of the new theory and the old. (1) The perihelion of Mercury shows a discrepancy which has long puzzled astronomers. This discrepancy is fully accounted for by Einstein. At the time when he published his theory, this was its only experimental verification.