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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.