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Professor de Robertis is particularly distinguished among electron microscopists for his persistent orientation toward correlating morphological with physiological data, and he has been an important contributor in illuminating the relations between structure and function. Some 50 years ago, the intensive collaboration of cytologists and geneticists helped enormously in the development of our knowledge of the mechanisms of heredity. This book signalizes a similar development, in which the problem of transmission of messages is being studied with the combined efforts of morphologists, pharmacologists, biochemists, and physiologists. De Robertis' book maps out some of the distance already covered and should stimulate still further progress. Naturally, in this monograph the morphological aspects receive the most detailed treatment and, in some respects perhaps too much detail. For example, the very diversity of synaptic morphologies in the face of remarkably similar physiological properties makes it unlikely that the minutiae of the different structures are of