Hunter and Toomre (1969) have demonstrated that a simple warp of a stellar disk will damp out within one or two galactic rotation periods due to rapid differential recession of stellar orbits. If, however, the galactic gravitational field is more nearly spherically symmetric, the rate of differential recession is decreased and the warp may persist for a longer time. We therefore propose that the observed gaseous warps exist in regions outside of the massive stellar disk; that is, in regions where the gravitational field is essentially spherically symmetric. A necessary condition of this hypothesis is that long-lived warps are present only in a low mass, low random velocity component of the galaxy – presumably the gas.