We review critically the concepts and the applications of Cayley Trees and
Bethe Lattices in statistical mechanics in a tentative effort to remove
widespread misuse of these simple, but yet important - and different - ideal
graphs. We illustrate, in particular, two rigorous techniques to deal with
Bethe Lattices, based respectively on self-similarity and on the Kolmogorov
consistency theorem, linking the latter with the Cavity and Belief Propagation
methods, more known to the physics community.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure