  I discuss how the chemical abundance distributions, kinematics and age
distributions of stars in the thin and thick disks of the Galaxy can be used to
decipher the merger history of the Milky Way, a typical large galaxy. The
observational evidence points to a rather quiescent past merging history,
unusual in the context of the `consensus' cold-dark-matter cosmology favoured
from observations of structure on scales larger than individual galaxies.
