It is not much use using emery which takes more than half an hour to settle in an ordinary bedroom jug. What remains in the liquid to be decanted is mostly glass mud and not emery at all. The process of fine grinding is continually checked by the spherometer, and the art consists in knowing how to move the grinding tool so as to make the lens surface more or less curved. In general it may be said that if the tool is moved in small sweeps, and not allowed to overhang much, the Centre of the lens will be more abraded, while if bold free strokes are taken with much overhanging, the edges of the lens will be more ground away. By the exercise of patience and perseverance any one will succeed in gradually fine grinding the lens surface and keeping it to the spherometer, but the skill comes in doing this rapidly by varying the shape of the strokes before any appreciable alteration of curvature has come about. Polishing. The most simple way of polishing is to coat the grinding tool with paper, as will be described, and then to brush some rouge into the paper. The polisher is moved over the work in much the same way as the fine grinding tool, until the glass is polished. Many operators prefer to use a tool made by squeezing a disc of slate, armed with squares of warm pitch, against the lens surface (finely ground), and then covering these squares with rouge and water instead of emery and water as in the fine grinding process. The final process is called "figuring." It will in general be unnecessary with a small lens. With large lenses or mirrors the final touches have to be given after the optical behaviour of the lens or mirror has been tested with the telescope itself, and this process is called "figuring." A book might easily be written on the optical indications of various imperfections in a mirror or lens. Suffice it to say here that a sufficiently skilled person will be able to decide from an observation of the behaviour of a telescope whether a lens will be improved by altering the curvature of one or all of the surfaces. A very small alteration will make a large difference in the optical properties, so that in general "figuring" is done merely by using the rouge polishing tool as an abrading tool, and causing it to alter the curves in the manner already suggested for grinding. There are other methods based on knocking squares out of the pitch-polisher so that some parts of the glass may be more abraded than others. The "figuring" and polishing may be done by hand just like the grinding. There are machines, however, which can be made to execute the proper motions, and a polisher is set in such a machine, and the mechanical work done is by no means inconsiderable. In fact for surfaces above six inches in diameter few people are strong enough to work a polisher by hand owing to the intense adhesion between it and the exactly fitting glass surface.