The salivary glands, whose innervation has long ago been investigated, have generally been accepted as types of the deeper-lying digestive glands, and when it became necessary to form a conception of the mode of activity of the latter, medical science resorted to a bold analogy and thought of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands. But the attempts of investigators to apply rigidly to others the scheme of innervation which holds good for the salivary glands, have done considerable harm to the usefulness of the analogy and have prevented our arriving at a correct idea of the plan of innervation of the abdominal glands. We have already had an example of this nature before us. In the salivary glands we have no clearly marked indications of nervous inhibition, and this circumstance has decidedly retarded the due development of our knowledge of the nervous control of the abdominal glands. Authors naturally expected to see a simple and prompt stimulation-effect from the same conditions of experiment which sufficed for the salivary glands, and the failure of this gave them, as they thought, the right to deny the existence of any extrinsic nervous influence upon the abdominal glands. The error is now obvious; the abdominal glands behave in some ways different from the salivary glands, and for their successful investigation, other conditions of experiment are necessary than those which held good for the former. In the working of the abdominal glands nervous inhibitory processes play a large part, but they are almost wholly absent in the case of the salivary glands. This is an additional warning that one must never push the conclusions drawn from analogy too far, but must constantly bear in mind that the life-functions of all organs are extremely complicated, and that the work of even the most apparently similar organs should be submitted to separate and careful observation. To me it appears that the unjustified analogy drawn between the abdominal and salivary glands has to be credited with another important misapprehension. And precisely for this reason I think it desirable to bring under consideration, if only in brief fashion, the conditions of work of the salivary glands, especially since Dr. Glinski has instituted in the laboratory some easily performed experiments which bear upon the matter.