A Guide to the Synaptic Analysis of the Neuropil
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
So far as our present knowledge goes we are led to think that the tip of a twig of the [axonal] arborescence is not continuous with but merely in contact with the substance of the dendrite or cell body on which it impinges. Such a special connection of one nerve cell with another might be called a synapsis.
(p. 929)
… each synapsis offers an opportunity for a change in the character of nervous impulses, that the impulse as it passes over from the terminal arborescence of an axon into the dendrite of another cell, starts in that dendrite an impulse having characters different from its own.
(p. 969)
—Foster and Sherrington (1897)
The criteria for recognizing synapses in morphological preparations arise directly out of the definitions that Sherrington (Foster and Sherrington 1897) gave when he introduced this term.1 By extracting the essence from the two passages introducing this article,...
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↵1 Fulton (1949) records in a footnote that the term synapse was suggested to Sherrington's co-author, Michael Foster, by a Greek scholar at Cambridge named Verrall. The original synapsis (from συναπτω — clasp) was apparently modified into synapse very early (perhaps by way of the plural for synapsis, synapses) since Sherrington uses the modern form in his Silliman Lectures of 1904 (published in 1906).
