The practical advantages, then, secured by the adoption of the homogeneous system were, on the whole, greater than any before made or believed to be possible, and when taken into account in connection with the improvement of the eye-piece (also due to Abbe), almost perfect achromatism and homogeneity between objective, object, and eye-piece is secured, together with a sharp definition of the image over the whole visual field. These, with an increase of working distance between the object and the objective, and other important results, have been placed within the reach of the microscopist by men of science, and the outcome is the general adoption of the homogeneous system, termed by Carl Zeiss, a fellow-worker with Abbe, the[22] apochromatic system of constructing objectives. Relative Merits of the English and German Objectives. As to the relative merits of German-made objectives, no superiority can be claimed for them over those made by English opticians. The Continental form of the 1/12-inch oil-immersion objective, shown in Fig. 118, on the scale of 6 to 1, consists of four systems of lenses, namely, the front, a deep hemispherical crown lens of high refractive index; the second front of the system, an achromatic lens of such a form that it gathers the light from the hemispherical front; the middle lens, a single meniscus; and the back an achromatised lens, the second front of the back being connected in such a way as to compensate for the spherical and chromatic aberrations of the front lens.