  We investigate the hyperfine splitting of the heavy baryons in the
bound-state approach. We start with an ordinary relativistic Lagrangian which
has been extensively used to discuss finite mass corrections to the heavy limit
predictions. It turns out that the dominant contribution arises from terms
which do not manifestly break the heavy spin symmetry. The actual heavy spin
violating terms are uncovered by carefully performing a 1/M expansion of this
Lagrangian.
