DEGENERATION OF THE BOUTONS TERMINAUX IN THE SPINAL CORD

Abstract

Theboutons terminauxare generally believed to be the end-processes of axons synapsing on the body and dendrites of a nerve cell (Liddell¹). In the spinal cord they are known to undergo rapid degeneration when the axon is cut. On this phenomenon depends theboutonmethod for describing the terminal arborization of fiber pathways. While the Marchi and Weigert methods may be successfully used to trace fiber tracts, they leave, nevertheless, the minute nonmyelinated nerve endings unstained. Theboutontechnic offers the best means of studying interrupted fiber pathways at their ultimate termination, and it has therefore a very wide field of application. The increasing use of the method has demanded a set of standards by which to judge stages of degeneration. The attempt is made here to correlate the relevant data onboutondegeneration scattered through the literature and to present pictorially the observations based on a study