Histology of the Nervous System of Man and Vertebrates

by S. Ramon y Cajal, translated from French by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995 A major neuroanatomic debate during the last quarter of the 19th century centered on the nature of connections between nerve cells. The debate began when Camillo Golgi refined the silver stain and used it to demonstrate, for the first time, the complexity of constituents and connections in the nervous system. An extension of these observations was his support of a hypothesis, probably derived from the cell theory of Schwann, that neurons were connected in a continuous reticulum or syncytium. This reticular network was, however, never pictured in any of Golgi's illustrations. In 1887, Wilhelm His first questioned …