December i, 1882.] THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 



457 



"^eliind or refuse to stalk tbat last snipe, although it 

 was necessary to drag through a swamp for 500 yards 

 or more. This experience of mine is borne out by 

 others who have travelled into the interior of Brazil, 

 where the choice lies between a cup of warm sweet 

 coffee and a draught of sugar cane rum, the smell of 

 which to any but an old resident is, to say the least 

 of it, jjaiuful. Beyond this slimulatiug power, coffee 

 . has great disinfecting properties and is used by many 

 who have to travel throug miasmatic districts as a 

 preventive against fevers. The Rev. Fatljcr Renelm 

 Vaughan, but a few years back ma'lo a journey by 

 land from Panama down to the River Plate, passing in 

 aud among and over the Audes during aspaoe of three 

 years, used coffee only as a stimulant, although he had 

 once to run the gauntlet through a long rock-bound 

 valley in Colombia, in which the water remained stag- 

 nant year after year, and the narrowuess of the gorge 

 prevented sufficient sunlight and heat entering to 

 dispel the vapours. I asked him what he took in 

 this horrible place, called by the natives by the sig- 

 nificant name of " Valley of Death," to which he 

 replied, " Why, coffee, of course !" This same gentle- 

 man also tells me that since the natives in the pestilent 

 districts near Guayaquil in Ecuador have substituted 

 coffee for their former beverages the death-rate has 

 fallen very considerably. 



Surely the retailers of burnt beans, Indian corn, 

 and other things falsely called coffVo do not 

 presume to claim such high honours for their 

 decoctions. Then, why should the honest artisan 

 or labourer be compelled to pay a high price for 

 things which can have no other recommendation 

 or virtue than that they are fraudulently called coffee ? 



Now, as to the price of coffee, there must be some- 

 thing seriously and radically wrong in the English market 

 for although the price received by the growers has fallen 

 almost to one-half of what it was from 1876 to ISSO, 

 and the pruduction has increased enormously, the price 

 has not fallen correspondingly for the retail buyer, 

 who still has to consider coffee as au expensive luxury 

 and one which has, therefore, to be mixed with chicory 

 and other adulterations. 



Brazilirtn coffee h.as bren unfairly abused in England 

 .and on the Continent,, owing to the merchants selling 

 the best washed Rio and Sao Paulo coffee as that of 

 either Mocha, Ceylon, or Java, whereas the inferior 

 coffees of other lands are too often called Brazilian. 

 To remedy this gross unfairness would be dilEcult, 

 but as " the proof of the pu'lding is in the eating," 

 so with the drinking can coffee be proved. Brazdian 

 coffee can stand this test, as is proved by the fact that 

 the coffee sent by Englishmen here to friends at home 

 has been declared by one aud all to be delicious, and 

 why not ? 



Brazilians, as a rule, do not prepare their coffee 

 for the market so well as the Ceylon aud Java planters 

 do, but even this reason is not sufficient to explain 

 the non-using or dislildug of Brazilian coffee, which, 

 when the beau is badly prepared, has a slightly bitter 

 flavour which ought to be appreciated by the mass of 

 Engliehmen. This bitterness can be very much lessened 

 by keeping the coffee beans ; in fact all coffees ought 

 to be kept for more than two years before being used. 

 Still supposing tliis tempering through time could not be 

 atrived at conveniently, there is no rea.^on wby an 

 Englisluuan shiuild not enjoy that which our American 

 friends in the States pronounce " excellent." Surely, 

 it seems as if fashion and tlie tricks of trade even go 

 so far as to govern our palates aud our prejudices. 



As a last, but by no means the least important point 

 to be remembered when advocating the use of pure cof- 

 fee is that in coffee lies the hope of the temper.i'i. c so- 

 cieties of being able to drag our many thousands of 

 drunkards away from their deatli -dealing, misery- 

 spreading vice, by giving them a stimulant which is 



agreeable to the taste, but which will not iTitoxicbte ; 

 these societies, therefore, should urge the fioverninent 

 to oblige the sale of unadulterated coffee, upholding 

 Mr. Ghadstone in his noble attempt to give his country- 

 men another real blessing. 



The dirtioulties in the way of the Government in 

 prohibiting the adulteration of coffee are, indeed, many, 

 such as were found in 1852, when the Government by 

 a Treasury minute tried to stop adulteration ; tliere can 

 be no doubt, however, tliat if penalties were attached 

 to the adulteration of coffee, ilie bulk of the respectable 

 trades-people would at ouce conform to the Uw, leaving 

 the cluciny, d.ates, aud other coffee falsifiers to take 

 care of themselves. If these suffered there wouhl lie at 

 leist the consolation of knowing that ninety atid nine 

 would be benefited, and the hundredth would ouly be 

 rewarded acordiug to his works. 



I am, sir, your obedient servant, 



Walter J. Hammond, 

 Engineer and General Manager Western of Sao Paulo, 

 Railway Company. 



Jundiahy, Province of Sao Paulo, Brazil, July 28th, 

 1882. 



THE LONDON "TIMES" ON COFFEE. 



Englishmen, us a Persian traveller has remarked, do 

 not worship the sun, probably because they have 

 never seeu the sun. Their want of devotion to coffee 

 may be explained in the same way. The majority 

 of Englishmen have never tasted anything that 

 deserves to be called coffee. Only a few of them 

 bave ever tasted the best coffee. Coffee has been on 

 its trial in this couutry for more than two hundred 

 years. It has had its ups and downs. It was received 

 at first with great favour, but by a very limited num- 

 ber of customers. By aud by the custom of coffee- 

 drinking spread. Coffee-houses grew and multiplied, 

 and were frequented by persons of every class, no 

 one, as Macaulay tells us, beiug refused who could lay 

 down his penny at the counter. It seems that, to a 

 certain extent, the ill-fame attached to them of beiug 

 a resort of disaffected persons and centres of disturb- 

 ance to the peace aud quiet of the nation. We should 

 hardly recognize the modern coffee palace under such a 

 description as this. It has come to be regarded 

 as an adjunct of social order, a mainstay of the 

 temperance movement, and so far wortuy in every 

 way of the support its promoters claim for it. If 

 there has been a falling-off anywhere, it hiis nol beeu 

 in the coffee-houses and their frequenters, but in the 

 coffee itself. The berry which Charles II. denounced, 

 and which he seems to have hated much .as his 

 royal grandfather hated tobacco, was at least good 

 of its kind. In those early days of coffee-driuking. 

 Mocha coffee had a monopoly of the market. But 

 as the demand for coffee increased, the supply of 

 Mocha coft'ea soon fell short. The culture in conse- 

 quence was extended. The attempt to grow coffee 

 outside Arabia was made first in the Dutch East 

 Indies, then, early in the eighteenth century, in the 

 West Indies. Since that date the coffee plant has 

 been in reduced into almost every tropical country, 

 and it lias flourished everywhere both in the old and 

 in the new world. But whether quantity and quality 

 have ktpt pace together is auotlierquestion. Experts 

 tell us that they have not ; that good Mocha coft'ee 

 is as distinct a thing now as it ever was, and that 

 those who have not fasted it simply do not know 

 what good coffee is. Englishmen, we are told, can 

 ortler 'lie best Mocha coffee ; they can be served with 

 something which bears the name ; they can pay 

 highly for it ; thei can do everything but get if, aud 

 this, we are assured they never do. .\11 the best 

 coffee which the Yemen district produces is kept for 

 nse in the ij.ast. Before it muves westward it 



