Previous
abstract 
Next
abstract
Multi-aperture spectrophotometry of H\,{\sc ii}~regions in 6 southern spiral galaxies has been used to confirm the existence of a universal correlation between the gas-phase oxygen abundance and the mean underlying $I$~band surface brightness at the radial distance of the H\,{\sc ii}~region. Such a relationship allows us to circumvent the normal scale dependencies of abundance gradients, and to attempt to model the evolution of a generic galaxy, instead of just our own Milky Way. Although the simple ``closed-box'' model of galaxy evolution predicts almost the right form of this relationship, a more realistic multi-zone model employing exponentially decreasing gas infall provides an extremely good fit to the observational data, provided the expected enriched gas return from dying intermediate- and low-mass stars shedding their envelopes at late epochs is properly taken into account . This same model, with a star formation law based upon self-regulating star formation in a three-dimensional disk (Dopita \& Ryder 1994, ApJ, 430, 163), is equally capable of accounting for the analogous relationship between recent massive star formation and stellar surface brightness (Ryder \& Dopita 1994, ApJ, 430, 142).
