But in order that any one who has some of this stone may be able to find, by his own experience, the truth of what I have just advanced, I will state here the process of which I have made use to cut it, and to polish it. Cutting is easy by the slicing wheels of lapidaries, or in the way in which marble is sawn: but polishing is very difficult, and by employing the ordinary means one more often depolishes the surfaces than makes them lucent.
After many trials, I have at last found that for this service no plate of metal must be used, but a piece of mirror glass made matt and depolished. Upon this, with fine sand and water, one smoothes the crystal little by little, in the same way as spectacle glasses, and polishes it simply by continuing the work, but ever reducing the material. I have not, however, been able to give it perfect clarity and transparency; but the evenness which the surfaces acquire enables one to observe in them the effects of refraction better than in those made by cleaving the stone, which always have some inequality.
Even when the surface is only moderately smoothed, if one rubs it over with a little oil or white of egg, it becomes quite transparent, so that the refraction is discerned in it quite distinctly. And this aid is specially necessary when it is wished to polish the natural surfaces to remove the inequalities; because one cannot render them lucent equally with the surfaces of other sections, which take a polish so much the better the less nearly they approximate to these natural planes.
Before finishing the treatise on this Crystal, I will add one more marvellous phenomenon which I discovered after having written all the foregoing. For though I have not been able till now to find its cause, I do not for that reason wish to desist from describing it, in order to give opportunity to others to investigate it. It seems that it will be necessary to make still further suppositions besides those which I have made; but these will not for all that cease to keep their probability after having been confirmed by so many tests.
The phenomenon is, that by taking two pieces of this crystal and applying them one over the other, or rather holding them with a space between the two, if all the sides of one are parallel to those of the other, then a ray of light, such as AB, is divided into two in the first piece, namely into BD and BC, following the two refractions, regular and irregular. On penetrating thence into the other piece each ray will pass there without further dividing itself in two; but that one which underwent the regular refraction, as here DG, will undergo again only a regular refraction at GH; and the other, CE, an irregular refraction at EF. And the same thing occurs not only in this disposition, but also in all those cases in which the principal section of each of the pieces is situated in one and the same plane, without it being needful for the two neighbouring surfaces to be parallel. Now it is marvellous why the rays CE and DG, incident from the air on the lower crystal, do not divide themselves the same as the first ray AB. One would say that it must be that the ray DG in passing through the upper piece has lost something which is necessary to move the matter which serves for the irregular refraction; and that likewise CE has lost that which was necessary to move the matter which serves for regular refraction: but there is yet another thing which upsets this reasoning. It is that when one disposes the two crystals in such a way that the planes which constitute the principal sections intersect one another at right angles, whether the neighbouring surfaces are parallel or not, then the ray which has come by the regular refraction, as DG, undergoes only an irregular refraction in the lower piece; and on the contrary the ray which has come by the irregular refraction, as CE, undergoes only a regular refraction.