The present monograph is an imaginative and courageous attempt to provide a synthesis of knowledge concerning the af ferent connections of the medial basal hypothalamus. Only somebody who has lived through most of the explosive develop ment - over the last 25 years or so - in the neuroscience in general, and in hypothalamic functional neuroanatomy in parti cular, can fully appreciate the remarkably consistent picture emerging from this study. The writer of this foreword was (alas!) an active participant in the very early and premature, and also largely naive, attempts to penetrate the "jungle" of hypothalamic connections with degeneration methods when they first became available in the late 1930s. (I have told a part of this rather pathetic story is an autobiographical sketch in Pioneers in Neuroendocrinology [Meites et aI. , (eds) (1975), Vol I. Plenum] because I was sufficiently self-critical not to publish my early results. ) Even with the suppressive Nauta-type silver stains, introduced in the mid-1950s, studies of hypothala mic connections had only marginal results, which the reader will certainly appreciate if he compares the relevant figures in the first edition of Hypothalamic Control of the Anterior Pituitary [Szentagothai et al. (1962) Akademiai Kiad6, Budapest], with Dr. Zaborszky's concluding diagrams. The approach used by Dr. Zaborszky of combining the more advanced Fink-Heimer type degeneration techniques, and some of their most recent modifications by Gallyas et al.

1 Introduction

1.1 The Functional Significance of the Medial Basal Hypothalamus
1.2 Scope of the Monograph
1.3 Historical Background
2 Materials and Methods
2.1 Light Microscopic Degeneration Techniques
2.2 Electron Microscopic Degeneration Studies
2.3 Lesioning of Nerve Tracts and Cell Groups
2.4 Fiber Tracing by the Retrograde Transport of Horseradish Peroxidase
2.5 Biochemistry
3 Fiber Systems Between the Lower Brain Stem and the Hypothalamus
3.1 The Functional Significance of Connections
3.2 Origin of Brain Stem Fibers to the MBH
3.3 Transmitters of Fibers to the MBH
3.4 Topography of Pathways Between the Lower Brain Stem and the Hypothalamus; Termination of Brain Stem Fibers in the MBH
3.5 Discussion
3.6 General Rules of Organization of Brain Stem-MBH Connections
4 Connections of the Limbic Systems with the MBH
4.1 Functional Significance of Connections
4.2 Connections Between the Hippocampus and the MBH
4.3 Fibers from Rostral Limbic Regions
4.4 Amygdalohypothalamic Connections
4.5 Discussion
4.6 Regularities in the Limbic-MBH Connections
5 Other Hypothalamic Afferents
6 Intrahypothalamic Connections
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Experimental Degeneration Studies
6.3 HRP Studies
6.4 Discussion
6.5 The Organization of Intrahypothalamic Connections
7 A Synthetic View of Local and Extrahypo- thalamic Neural Circuits
8 Functional Implications
8.1 Anterior Pituitary Regulation
8.2 Various Behavioral Functions
9 Summary
Abbreviations Used in Figures
References.