I cannot begin this brief paper respecting our honored friend, the late President (who was also the founder) of this Society, without expressing my sense of personal bereavement in connection with his death. His unfailing vivacity, his amiable temper, his generous recognition of contemporary scholars in the same field with himself, and his loyal friendship, may well cause us to lament that his genial presence will no more be with us. He had long been a living, visible link, binding us to Germany, the land of scholars, the country which to many of us is an intellectual fatherland. Circumstances—or, what is the same thing, the leadings of Providence—conspired to fit him for that cosmopolitan place and versatile activity which characterized him. A Swiss by birth, but of German extraction, besides his early training in South Germany he studied at the three universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin. Born and bred in the Reformed branch of the Protestant family, he was thus brought into intercourse in his youth with such men as Neander, Tholuck, and Müller, the great lights of the liberal, evangelical—I will not say party, for they were of no party, but class, among the Lutherans. His theological studies were not less diversified than his personal associations.