A detailed treatment of the geometric aspects of discrete groups was carried out by Raghunathan in his book "Discrete subgroups of Lie Groups" which appeared in 1972. In particular he covered the theory of lattices in nilpotent and solvable Lie groups, results of Mal'cev and Mostow, and proved the Borel density theorem and local rigidity theorem ofSelberg-Weil. He also included some results on unipotent elements of discrete subgroups as well as on the structure of fundamental domains. The chapters concerning discrete subgroups of semi­ simple Lie groups are essentially concerned with results which were obtained in the 1960's. The present book is devoted to lattices, i.e. discrete subgroups of finite covolume, in semi-simple Lie groups. By "Lie groups" we not only mean real Lie groups, but also the sets of k-rational points of algebraic groups over local fields k and their direct products. Our results can be applied to the theory of algebraic groups over global fields. For example, we prove what is in some sense the best possible classification of "abstract" homomorphisms of semi-simple algebraic group over global fields.