PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 415 



great an exception to the law of geographical botany. 

 But then how did the species (or cultivated variety) pass 

 from the American continent to the old world ? This 

 is hard to guess, but I am inclined to believe that the 

 first slave-ships carried it from Brazil to Guinea, and the 

 Portuguese from Brazil into the islands to the south of 

 Asia, in the end of the fifteenth century. 



Coffee — Coffea arabica, Linnaeus. 



This shrub, belonging to the family of the Rubiacese, 

 is wild in Abyssinia,-^ in the Soudan,^ and on the coasts 

 of Guinea and Mozambique.^ Perhaps in these latter 

 localities, so far removed from the centre, it may be 

 naturalized from cultivation. No one has yet found it 

 in Arabia, but this may be explained by the difficulty 

 of penetrating into the interior of the country. If it 

 is discovered there it will be hard to prove it wild, for 

 the seeds, which soon lose their faculty of germinating, 

 often spring up round the plantations and naturalize the 

 species. This has occurred in Brazil and the West India 

 Islands,* where it is certain that the cofiee plant was 

 never indigenous. 



The use of cofiee seems to be very ancient in Abys- 

 sinia. Shehabeddin Ben, author of an Arab manuscript 

 of the fifteenth century (No. 944^ of the Paris Library), 

 quoted in John Ellis's excellent work,^ says that cofiee 

 had been used in Abyssinia from time immemorial. Its 

 use, even as a drug, had not spread into the neighbouring 

 countries, for the crusaders did not know it, and the 

 celebrated physician Ebn Baithar, born at Malaga, who 

 had travelled over the north of Africa and Syria at the 

 beginning of the thirteenth century of the Christian 

 era, does not mention cofiee.^ In 1596 Bellus sent to 

 de I'Ecluse some seeds from which the Egyptians ex- 



^ Richard, Tentamen Fl. Abyss., i. p. 349; Oliver, Fl. Trop. Afr., iii. 

 p. 180. 



2 Ritter, quoted in Flora, 1846, p. 704. 



' Meyen, Geogr. Bot., English trans., p. 384; Grisebach, Fl. of Brit. 

 W. Ind. Is., p. 338. 



^ H. Welter, Essai sur I'Histoire du GafS, 1 vol. in 8vo, Paris, 1868. 



* Ellis, An Historical Account of Coffee, 1774. 



* Ebn Baithar, Sondtheimer's trans., 2 vols. 8vo, 1842. 



