"Vladimir Vernadsky was a brilliant and prescient scholar-a true scientific visionary who saw the deep connections between life on Earth and the rest of the planet and understood the profound implications for life as a cosmic phenomenon." -DAVID H. GRINSPOON, AUTHOR OF VENUS REVEALED"The Biosphere should be required reading for all entry level students in earth and planetary sciences." -ERIC D. SCHNEIDER, AUTHOR OF INTO THE COOL: THE NEW THERMODYNAMICS OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

"What Darwin did for life through time, Vernadsky did for life through space on a geological scale." --Lynn Margulis This classic 1926 book is the first sustained expression of the idea, now widely accepted, that life is a geological force. It founded the field of biogeochemistry and is one of the seminal works in what is now known as Gaia theory. This edition, the first unexpurgated English translation, is fully annotated for the modern reader.

One The Biosphere in the Cosmos.- The Biosphere in the Cosmic Medium.- The Biosphere as a Region of Transformation of Cosmic Energy.- The Empirical Generalization and the Hypothesis.- Living Matter in the Biosphere.- The Multiplication of Organisms and Geochemical Energy in Living Matter 6o.- Photosynthetic Living Matter.- Some Remarks on Living Matter in the Mechanism of the Biosphere.- Two The Domain of Life.- The Biosphere: An Envelope of the Earth.- Living Matter of the First and Second Orders in the Biosphere 103 The Limits of Life.- The Limits of Life in the Biosphere.- Life in the Hydrosphere.- Geochemical Cycles of the Living Concentrations and Films of the Hydrosphere.- Living Matter on Land.- The Relationship Between the Living Films and Concentrations of the Hydrosphere and Those of Land.- Appendix I: A Biographical Chronology.- Appendix II: Vernadsky's Publications in English.- Acknowledgments.