Cytoid bodies have been the concern largely of ophthalmologic pathologists. They were noted almost a century ago as peculiar celllike bodies found in the nerve fiber layer of the retina in albuminuric, traumatic or septic retinitis, in papillitis and in severe anemia. Similar bodies were also soon recognized in gliomas of the intra-orbital portion of the optic nerve.1 Their occurrence in these tumors was particularly stressed by Verhoeff2 in 1921, with the statement that they were "produced by the distension of a process of a neuroglia cell." The same origin was again ascribed to these structures eleven years later3 by the same observer, who said that "they are surrounded by neuroglia cytoplasm," but that "the substance composing them is derived from red blood corpuscles which have permeated into the neuroglia syncytium [sic] and there undergone a peculiar transformation." Verhoeff also added that he had