IN their recent article in Nature, Andersen, Eccles and Loyning1 claim to have unequivocally identified the basket cells of the hippocampus as the inhibitory neurones of this brain structure. They claim that “there is no alternative” to this interpretation and that it therefore “seems possible for the first time to give an example from the mammalian nervous system of a recurrent inhibitory pathway where both the inhibitory neurone and its synapses are histologically identifiable”.