  I review measurements of element abundances in different components of the
high redshift universe, including the Lyman alpha forest, damped Lyman alpha
systems, and Lyman break galaxies. Although progress is being made in all three
areas, recent work has also produced some surprises and shown that established
ideas about the nature of the damped Lyman alpha systems in particular may be
too simplistic. Overall, our knowledge of metal abundances at high z is still
very sketchy. Most significantly, there seems to be an order of magnitude
shortfall in the comoving density of metals which have been measured up to now
compared with those produced by the star formation activity seen in Lyman break
galaxies. At least some of the missing metals are likely to be in hot gas in
galactic halos and proto-clusters.
