 The Hilbert 1917 lectures and the 1918 Bernays Habilitation are a milestone in the development of first-order logic. In the lectures, for the first time, first-order logic is presented in its own right as an axiomatic logical system, suitable for study using the new metalogical techniques. It was those metalogical techniques that represented the crucial advance over Peirce and Frege and Russell, and that were in time to bring first-order logic into focus. But that did not happen at once, and a great deal of work still lay ahead. In the 1917/18 lectures Hilbert’s sequence of logical calculi were presented as stepping-stones on the way to full higher-order ramified type theory, which he continued to regard as the “right” logical framework for investigating the foundations of mathematics. It was characteristic of Hilbert to break complex mathematical phenomena into their elements: the sequence of calculi can be viewed as a decomposition of higher-order logic into its simpler component parts, revealing to his students precisely the steps that went into the building of the full system. Although he discusses the functional calculus, he does not single it out for special attention. In other words (and as with Peirce three decades earlier) first-order logic is introduced primarily as an expository device: its importance was not yet clear.