alembic

plural alembics · alternative obsolete alembick · alternative obsolete limbeck

1. alchemyAn early chemical apparatus, consisting of two retorts connected by a tube, used to purify substances by distillation.

   Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man.

   1836, Emerson, Nature, Chapter 3

   4 more examples

   Ideal beauty is not the mind’s creation: it is real beauty, refined and purified in the mind’s alembic, from the alloy which always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature.

   1818, Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter 11

   The great physiologist Schwann, for instance, who died in 1882, maintained that there was an insurmountable barrier between us and those whom Michelet calls our inferior brethren. To him animals were alembics and electric batteries; mechanics, physics, and chemistry could account for all their manifestations.

   1886, Joseph Rémi Léopold Delbœuf, What May Animals Be Taught?

   We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses —

   1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

   We’ll need to get you a copy of the charter, a beginner’s alembic, maybe a complementary silver dagger… and that’s not even counting whether or not we have any beginner-level books on disciplines you’re interested in!

   2012, Kazerad, Ten minutes later..., in: Prequel -or- Making a Cat Cry: The Adventure (webcomic), March 27 2012