To my loyal Frederick-William University, I offer greeting and congratulations on this its hundredth anniversary! From the day of its founding its fortunes have been intimately bound up with those of the Prussian-German Fatherland. When my ancestor King Frederick William III called it into existence a hundred years ago, he did so in order to compensate the state with spiritual powers for what she had lost in physical power. Thus the University of Berlin was born out of the same creative genius from which sprung the regeneration of Prussia. And this spirit, which raised up Prussian Germany and which lived in Fichte, Schleiermacher, Savigny, and their friends, made the university even in a few years the centre of the spiritual and intellectual life of the Fatherland. Truly, the University of Berlin was still far from being a _universitas litterarum_ in the sense of William von Humboldt, but it has come ever nearer and nearer to this ideal. A stronghold of wisdom, she has won, far beyond the boundaries of Prussia and Germany, an international significance. Through the exchange of teachers and students these relations are visible externally. Through the activity which it shares in common with the rest of the universities of the country it now forms the "general institute of learning" which was intended at its founding. In the meantime Humboldt's plan, which comprised besides the university the totality of intellectual institutions, has not yet come to complete realization, and these hours of consecration seem to me especially fitted for preparing the way for the completion of what appeared to him as the goal. His great educational plan demanded, besides the academies of learning and the university, independent institutes for research as an integral part of the general educational organization. The founding of such institutions has not kept pace in Prussia with the development of the universities, and this defect, especially in our natural-science equipment, is becoming more and more noticeable as a result of the powerful forging ahead of the sciences. We need institutions which reach out beyond the limits of the universities, institutions untrammelled by aims of instruction, yet in close touch with the academy and the university, which shall serve entirely for research.