The German Translation Project is a series of posting of translations that represent the outcomes of my efforts to learn to read German well enough to understand and perhaps even translate German academic texts. I was inspired to set this goal after chatting with a member of the history faculty at UMass Boston. She is a medievalist who indicated how much she wished her German allowed her to read German texts. I agreed, and having some exposure to German (I lived in Vienna for about four years) I decided to throw myself into it. As it happens, at this time I was also reading German Universities: A Narrative of Personal Experience Together with Recent Statistical Information, Practical Suggestions, And a Comparison of the German, English and American Systems of Higher Education by James Morgan Hart, who describes in some detail how he learned German to study at Göttingen in 1861, which gave me an idea of the nature of this undertaking.