Mehra and Bjerknes point out that Hilbert's 1924 version of the article contained the sentence "... und andererseits auch Einstein, obwohl wiederholt von abweichenden und unter sich verschiedenen Ansätzen ausgehend, kehrt schließlich in seinen letzten Publikationen geradenwegs zu den Gleichungen meiner Theorie zurück" - "Einstein [...] in his last publications ultimately returns directly to the equations of my theory.". These statements of course do not have any particular bearing on the matter at issue. No one disputes that Hilbert had "his" theory, which was a very ambitious attempt to combine gravity with a theory of matter and electromagnetism along the lines of Mie's theory, and that his equations for gravitation agreed with those that Einstein presented beginning in Einstein's 25 November paper (which Hilbert refers to as Einstein's later papers to distinguish them from previous theories of Einstein). None of this bears on the precise origin of the trace term in the Einstein field equations (a feature of the equations that, while theoretically significant, does not have any effect on the vacuum equations, from which all the empirical tests proposed by Einstein were derived).