The present monograph grew out of the fifth set of Hermann Weyl Lectures, given by Professor Griffiths at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in fall 1974. In Chapter 1 the author discusses Emile Borel's proof and the classical Jensen theorem, order of growth of entire analytic sets, order functions for entire holomorphic mappings, classical indicators of orders of growth, and entire functions and varieties of finite order. Chapter 2 is devoted to the appearance of curvature, and Chapter 3 considers the defect relations. The author considers the lemma on the logarithmic derivative, R. Nevanlinna's proof of the defect relation, and refinements of the classical case.