  Hubble Space Telescope imaging of 11 fields in M31 were reduced to
color-magnitude diagrams. The fields were chosen to sample all galactocentric
radii to 50 kpc. Assuming that the bulk of the sampled stellar populations are
older than a few Gyr, the colors of the red giants map to an abundance
distribution with errors of order 0.1 dex in abundance. The radially sampled
abundance distributions are all about the same width, but show a mild abundance
gradient that flattens outside ~20 kpc. The various distributions were weighted
and summed with the aid of new surface brightness profile fits to obtain an
abundance distribution representative of the entirety of M31. M31 is a system
near chemical maturity. This ``observed closed box'' is compared to analytical
closed box models. M31 suffers from a lack of metal-poor stars and metal-rich
stars relative to the simplest closed-box model in the same way as the solar
neighborhood.Comparing to several simple chemical evolution models, neither
complete mixing of gas at all times nor zero mixing, inhomogeneous models give
the most convincing match to the data. As noted elsewhere, the outer disk of
M31 is a factor of ten more metal-rich than the Milky Way halo, ten times more
metal-rich than the dwarf spheroidals cospatial with it, and more metal-rich
than most of the globular clusters at the same galactocentric radius.
Difficulties of interpretation are greatly eased if we posit that the M31 disk
dominates over the halo at all radii out to 50 kpc. In fact, scaling from
current density models of the Milky Way, one should not expect to see halo
stars dominating over disk stars until beyond our 50 kpc limit. A corollary
conclusion is that most published studies of the M31 "halo" are actually
studies of its disk.
