Inorganic chemistry is to a great extent the chemistry of high polymers. This is not apparent from reading much of the inorganic literature of the last quarter-century, since the research problems described therein have often been carefully selected to avoid complications due to high-polymer formation. Nevertheless, the physical properties of many of the reaction products described in the early inorganic-chemistry literature prior to 1900 clearly show these materials to be macromolecular. In the recent inorganic literature there is a growing trend toward considering the chemistry of the larger molecular structures instead of merely ringing the changes of substituents on a single atom. Thus, we see that inorganic polymers are at once very old and very new.