rest of the book is devoted to the description of the general principles of construction (Chapter II) and the discussion of several examples in Chapter II-IV. In an appendix we explain how the (topological) trace formula can be used to get some understanding of the problems discussed in the book. Only some of this material is really proved: the book also contains speculative considerations, which give some hints as to how the problems could be tackled. Hence the book should be viewed as the outline of a programme and it offers some interesting problems which are of importance and can be pursued by the reader. In the widest sense the subject of the paper is number theory and belongs to what is called arithmetic algebraic geometry. Thus the reader should be familiar with some algebraic geometry, number theory, the theory of Liegroups and th