"Cucurbite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... retort and the worm-still. It varied considerably in form and construction, but consisted essentially of three parts—a vessel containing the material to be distilled and called, from its gourd-like shape, the cucurbit or mattrass; a vessel to receive and condense the vapour, called the head or capital; and a receiver for the spirit, connected by a pipe with the capital. The entire apparatus was sometimes constructed of glass, but it was more usual to make the cucurbit of copper ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... (Al-Kohl), originally meaning "extreme tenuity or impalpable state of pulverulent substances," clearly shows the origin of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 1036, nearly two hundred years before we read of distillation in Europe, compared the human body with an alembic, the belly being the cucurbit and the head the capital:-he forgot one important difference but n'importe. Spirits of wine were first noticed in the xiiith century, when the Arabs had overrun the Western Mediterranean, by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who dubs the new ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton |
