This encylopedic volume `has been adapted from the fifth edition of Phosphorus: An outline of its chemistry, biochemistry & technology (1995), to which corrections, major rearrangements of text, and many additions have been made'. Phosphorus chemistry is treated `as a major branch of science in its own right - displacing the outmoded and frequently inappropriate concepts of "organic" and "inorganic" branches of chemistry... inherited from earlier centuries'.