We review the Skyrme model approach which treats baryons as solitons of an
effective meson theory. We start out with a historical introduction and a
concise discussion of the original two flavor Skyrme model and its
interpretation. Then we develop the theme, motivated by the large NCā
approximation of QCD, that the {\it effective} Lagrangian of QCD is in fact one
which contains just mesons of all spins. When this Lagrangian is (at least
approximately) determined from the meson sector it should then yield a zero
parameter description of the baryons. We next discuss the concept of chiral
symmetry and the technology involved in handling the three flavor extension of
the model at the collective level. This material is used to discuss properties
of the light baryons based on three flavor meson Lagrangians containing just
pseudoscalars and also pseudoscalars plus vectors. The improvements obtained by
including vectors are exemplified in the treatment of the {\it proton spin
puzzle}.Comment: Invited review for INSA-Book-2000 38 pages, 4 figures included via
epsfi
