The work of which this paper is an account began as a study of differential equations for functions whose values are random variables of finite variance. It was intended that all questions of convergence should be treated from the standpoint of strong convergence in Hilbert space—familiar to probabilists from the writings of Karhunen(11) and Loève(13) asmean-squareconvergence. The more general Banach-space approach now adopted was made possible by the discovery of a theorem (Theorem 1 of this paper) which Mr D. G. Kendall, its apparent author, kindly communicated to us.