Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramon y Cajal: the anatomical organization of the cortex of the cerebellum. Can the neuron doctrine still support our actual knowledge on the cerebellar structural arrangement?

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal were the two main investigators that revealed the morphological organizationof the cerebellar cortex, althoughtheynever sharedthe samebasic concepts.While for Golgi all axons fused into a large syncytium(the diffuse nerve network), for Cajal they had free endings and communication between neurons was done by contiguity not by continuity. The classical diagrammatic representation of the cerebellar circuitry shown by Cajal in his Croonian lecture (1894), although still valid, has drastically change by the accumulation of the great amount of data generated from 1894 to our days. The topic of this review is to briefly summarize this newknowledge, and to confront it with Cajal's concepts, to determinewhether or not the added complexity to the circuit invalidates the Cajal's principles. Our conclusion is that although most of these principles are consolidated, the applicability of the law of dynamic polarization does not adapt to some of them.Funding for this project was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grant BFU2008-00588/BFI).Peer Reviewe