vi PREFACE 



recent triumphs may be as easy to follow now, and as 

 welcome as it was in his own day. 



What Sir William and Lady Huggins recently said 

 of their own labours with the spectroscope, Herschel 

 could have said a century before of the difficulties 

 his sister and he encountered and overcame with the 

 telescope : " It is scarcely possible at the present day. 

 when all these points are as familiar as household 

 words, for any astronomer to realise the large amount 

 of time and labour which had to be devoted to the 

 construction of the first star spectroscope." 1 

 1 Atlas, 1899, p. 8. 



