Submillimetre cosmology.

Source counts and redshift distributions for star-forming galaxies in those submillimetre wavebands that are accessible from good ground-based observing sites are presented. Because of the very steep dust spectra of star-forming galaxies in the submillimetre wavebands, the K-corrections are large and negative and this greatly enhances the observability of star-forming galaxies at redshifts z ~ 2 - 5 in these wavebands. Simulations are carried out for different models of the formation of galaxies, and it is shown that submillimetre observations at the flux densities accessible with the next generation of submillimetre array detectors can discriminate between some of these models.