Distillation is a very ancient process. Evidence exists of its use by the Chinese in the most remote period of their history, and possibly they distilled wine. But so far as can be traced spirit was not produced from wine previous to the thirteenth century. Berthelot investigated some alleged early references to it and came to the conclusion indicated. Aristotle alludes to the possibility of rendering sea water potable by vaporising it, and he also notes elsewhere that wine gives off an exhalation which emits a flame. Theophrastus mentions that wine poured on a fire as in libations can produce a flame. Pliny indicates a particular locality which produced a wine of Falerno, which was the only wine that could be inflamed by contact with fire. At Alexandria, in the first century of the Christian era, condensing apparatus was invented, and descriptions of the apparatus used are known, but no allusion to the distillation of wine occurs in any existing reference to the chemistry of that period. Rhazes, who died in A.D. 925, is alleged to have mentioned a spirit distilled from wine, but Berthelot shows that this is a misunderstanding of a passage relating to false or artificial wines. Water distilled from roses is mentioned by Nicander, about 140 B.C., and the same author employs the term ambix for the pot or apparatus from which this water was obtained. The Arabs adopted this word, and prefixing to it their article, al, made it into alembic. This in English appeared for some centuries in the abbreviated form of limbeck. The Greek ambix was a cup-shaped vessel which was set on or in a fire, as a crucible was used. Pissaeleum was a peculiar form of distillation practised by the Romans. It was an oil of pitch made by hanging a fleece of wool over a vessel in which pitch was being boiled. The vapour which collected was pressed out and used. Distilled waters from roses and aromatic herbs figured prominently in the pharmacy of the Arabs, and Geber, perhaps in the eighth century, describes the process, and may have used it for other than pharmaceutical purposes. Avicenna likens the body of man to a still, the stomach being the kettle, the head the cap, and the nostrils the cooling tube from which the distillate drips. M. Berthelot gives the following from the Book of Fires of Marcus Grecas, which he says could not be earlier than 1300, as the first definite indication of a method of producing what was called aqua ardens. “Take a black wine, thick and old. To ¼ lb. of this add 2 scruples of sulphur vivum in very fine powder, and 2 scruples of common salt in coarse fragments, and 1 or 2 lbs. of tartar extracted from a good white wine. Place all in a copper alembic and distil off the aqua ardens.” The addition of the salt and sulphur, M. Berthelot explains, was to counteract the supposed humidity.