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Alembic   Listen
noun
Alembic  n.  An apparatus formerly used in distillation, usually made of glass or metal. It has mostly given place to the retort and worm still. Note: Used also metaphorically. "The alembic of a great poet's imagination."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Alembic" Quotes from Famous Books



... in the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offences are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head and front, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... ratafia; as then two poisons are swallowed at the same time. And vinegar, as it contains much vinous spirit, is probably a noxious part of our diet. And the distilled vinegar, which is commonly sold in the shops, is truly poisonous, as it is generally distilled by means of a pewter or leaden alembic-head or worm-tube, and abounds with lead; which any one may detect by mixing with it a solution of liver of sulphur. Opium, when taken as a luxury, not as a medicine, is as pernicious as alcohol; as Baron de Tott relates in his account of the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... after his fall, Mr. Chops is found on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it, "gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's." Out of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent mirth—an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... all things, his facts as well as his theories; and not only the greater part of his poetry, but the political and philosophical speculations in which he indulged, were all distilled through the same over-refining and unrealizing alembic. Having started as a teacher and reformer of the world, at an age when he could know nothing of the world but from fancy, the persecution he met with on the threshold of this boyish enterprise only confirmed him in his first paradoxical views of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... center of transition lay somewhere in Central Asia, to the north of the great Himalayan range. That this region was a sort of alembic, a melting-pot (as America is today) for various peoples of an ancient world-wide culture, as broad at least in its scope as the term Aryan is today. That this culture displayed the ideographic traits we have discussed, and that it has left more or less definite traces at different ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates

... way, and make, as it were, a composite mind for himself to think with. His intellect was of a very rare and delicate sort, and whilst he was essentially a reproducer, he was in no sense an imitator, or even for a single second a plagiarist. He had an alembic of his own which made old things new. His best possession was that very real sense of proportion which was at the root of all his humour. 'Why doesn't God explain these things to a gentleman like me?' There, a profound habitual reverence of mind suddenly encounters with a ludicrous perception ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... be secreted in the temples and monasteries of Egypt: much useful experience might have been acquired in the practice of arts and manufactures, but the science of chemistry owes its origin and improvement to the industry of the Saracens. They first invented and named the alembic for the purposes of distillation, analyzed the substances of the three kingdoms of nature, tried the distinction and affinities of alkalis and acids, and converted the poisonous minerals into soft and salutary remedies. But the most ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... crusty Port. A veritable den it was, filled with what seemed to be the wrecks of philosophical apparatus dating back two or three generations—ill-fated ventures on the treacherous main of science. Here a fat-bellied alembic lolled lazily over in a gleamy sand-bath, like a beach-lost galleon at ebb-tide; and there a heap of broken porcelain-tubing and shreds of crucibles lay like bleaching ship-ribs on a sullen shore. Beyond, by the middle window, stood a furnace, fireless, and clogged with gray ashes. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... yellow surface which covers oranges and distill them in an alembic, until the distillation may ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... in the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offenses are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... decay of the parts comprising the animal economy. The urine is this detritus in a state of solution. The components of urine are chemically similar to those of calculi, and as the components of the one vary according to the disintegration occurring at the time in the vital alembic, so do those of the other. While, therefore, a calculus is only as urine precipitated and solidified, and this fluid only as calculous matter suspended in a menstruum, it must appear that the lithic diathesis is as natural and universal ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... you in one draught of song, Caught in this rhymster's cup from earth's delight, Where English fields are green the whole year long— The wine of might, That the new-come spring distills, most sweet and strong, In the viewless air's alembic, that's wrought too fine for sight. Good health! we pledge, that care may lightly sleep, And pain of age be gone for this one day, As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep, Are glad at heart straightway To feel once more the friendly heat ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... knowledge, and refined taste of Herbert, charms of which Cadurcis was very susceptible Cadurcis had not been a great reader himself, and he liked the company of one whose mind was at once so richly cultured and so deeply meditative: thus he obtained matter and spirit distilled through the alembic of another's brain. Jealousy had never had a place in Herbert's temperament; now he was insensible even to emulation. He spoke of Cadurcis as he thought, with the highest admiration; as one without a rival, and in whose power it was to obtain an imperishable fame. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... bruise your spice, stone your cherries, and steep them in the wine; then add to them half a handful of rosemary, half a handful of balm, and one quarter of a handful of sweet marjoram. Let them steep in an earthen pot twenty-four hours, and, as you put them into the alembic to distil them, bruise them with your hands; make a gentle fire under them, and distil by slow degrees. You may mix the waters at your pleasure when you have drawn them all. Sweeten it with loaf sugar; then strain it into another glass ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury

... the touch of a skirt in passing would brush out fragrance from it. There were things there that strangely seemed to have no smell at all; but grown in such rank masses, they contributed mysteriously to the alembic ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... rich perfume Chemic art did ne'er presume Through her quaint alembic strain, None so sov'reign to the brain; Nature, that did in thee excel, Framed again no second smell. Roses, violets, but toys For the smaller sort of boys, Or for greener damsels meant; Thou ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... of frenzy of enthusiasm the scholar fell to pacing the floor, now mouthing hexameters, now spurning with his foot a pot or an alembic which had the ill-luck to lie in his path. Grio watched him, and watching him, grew only more puzzled—and more puzzled. He could have understood a moral shrinking from the enterprise on which they were both embarked—the betrayal of the city that gave them shelter. He could have understood—he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... consider accidents, my son, are the machinations of our invisible enemies. The treasures and golden secrets of nature are surrounded by spirits hostile to man. The air about us teems with them. They lurk in the fire of the furnace, in the bottom of the crucible, and the alembic, and are ever on the alert to take advantage of those moments when our minds are wandering from intense meditation on the great truth that we are seeking. We must only strive the more to purify ourselves from, those gross and earthly feelings which becloud the soul, and prevent her from piercing ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... should youth ever be expected to name the cup it has not tasted? For Dick, he thought again, what is known as love was a simple, however overwhelming, matter of the mounting blood, the growing year. For him it would be the ashes of forgotten fire, the strange alembic mixed of bitter with the sweet. In that moment he faced an acknowledged regret that he had not lived the normal life of marriage at the start, the quieting of foolish fevers, the witness of children. We are not, he reflected, quite solvent unless we pay tribute before we go. He mused off into the ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... fluids, the laws and functions of which have been deduced from calculations of velocities, altitudes, diameters, friction, &c. Another class considered man as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained, and ignorance was cunningly veiled in mystery. ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... error," replied the archdeacon, gravely. "Daedalus is the base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice,—that is all. You shall come when you will," he continued, turning to Tourangeau, "I will show you the little parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas Flamel's alembic, and you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera. But, first of all, I will make you read, one after the other, the marble letters of the alphabet, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... too familiar with it, it will be -very intelligible to the audience, even if they have not read the original fable; and you have had the address to make it coherent, without the marvellous, though so much depended on that part. In short, you have put my extravagant materials in an alembic, and drawn ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional voluptuousness of the music was so transmuted in the alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was eliminated. An incident illustrative of his devotion to Wagner is worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in Germany, we had for part of the time our headquarters ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... "Shut up!" she cried, and resting her chin in her cupped hands gazed over the sparkling, shimmering plain, where all unshadowed day-beams seemed to gather as pure light and then, as if fused in some magic alembic, became color. There, the ineffable command: "Let there be light!" included all. It is only in the silence and light of the desert that men may fully realize that the universe is one, that light is music and music is color and color is fragrance, undifferentiated ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... bitter cautery Shall fierily search my soul, destroy her ill." Natheless, the wounded wasting malady Is her unexorcised sad sovran still. Oh! that alembic fever of interwed Desire and dream and sense, rapture and rue! As soon as my sincerest words are said And heard they seem apostate and untrue. For only speech more richly dubious Than shoaling water, or a ringdove's breast, Than lighted incense more miraculous ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... good works and age, Approached the Sabbath of her pilgrimage; Her spirit to himself the Almighty drew, Breathed on the alembic, and exhaled the dew.' ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... principally on account of the absurdity it involves,—that God has expressly supplemented human reason by a revelation containing an indeterminate but large portion of falsities, errors, and absurdities and which we are to commit to our little alembic, and distil as we may; not only from the absurdity of supposing that God has demanded our faith, for statements which are to be received only as they appear perfectly comprehensible by our reason;—or, in other words, only for what it is impossible that we should doubt or deny; ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... Evelyn Colcord, sitting like a statue, unable to move nor to speak, passed through a limbo of nameless emotion. Through her mind swept a flashing filament of despair, hope, craven fear, and sturdy resolution. Tortured in the human alembic, she was at length resolved, seeing with a vision that pierced all her horizons. And then, trembling, tense, there came—a thought? A vision? She knew not what it was, nor was she conscious of attempting to ascertain. She knew only that for a fleeting instant ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various



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