History and What It Became

The pelican belongs to the same family of specialized distilling vessels documented in medieval and early modern alchemical texts, where vessels were named for the animal or object their shape and function called to mind, a common naming habit that also produced names like the moor's head and the philosophical egg. The bird its name refers to was believed, in medieval bestiary tradition, to tear open its own breast to feed its blood to its chicks, and alchemical writers read that self-wounding, self-giving image onto the vessel's arms curving back into its own body to feed the vapor it had just produced back into itself. The pelican found its most sustained use in the spagyric tradition associated with Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, where circulation over gentle heat was prized as a way to slowly refine and mature a plant extract rather than simply separate it by boiling point.

Unlike many of its period neighbors, the pelican survived the shift from alchemy into chemistry with its name and function essentially intact: laboratory glassware suppliers still manufacture and sell a pelican flask, built exactly on the same closed-arm principle, for chemists and pharmacists who need a slow, closed-loop distillation today.