RAW OR GREEN COFFEES. 203 



the puncture closed up. Another ingenious method is to 

 soften the fibrous cord of which the withes are made, 

 and with which the bales are sewn, by a process known 

 as " steaming," by which they are softened and drawn 

 out, the bales being easily opened entire and the contents 

 substituted by the introduction of one or other of the 

 same class of coffees already mentioned, and even by 

 small-bean Rios, particularly when the former kinds are 

 high or difficult to procure. These glaring forms of 

 adulteration and substitutions practiced in Mocha coffee 

 may be readily detected by a comparison of the mixture 

 or contents with a sample of the genuine bean, which is 

 invariably small, round, uniform and-symmetrical, varying 

 in color from a rich olive-green cast, almost translucent 

 when new, and a bright-yellowish hue when old, being 

 at the same very clean, and attractive in the hand. While 

 the adulterants and substitutes are much larger, more 

 irregular and varying in size, style, form and color, from 

 a dark or grass-green to a pale white, according to the 

 age and nature of the coffee used. 



There has recently been discovered another and very 

 ingenuous coffee fraud, in which the raw beans look quite 

 natural, but yield no coffee liquor on infusion. On close 

 inspection these spent or exhausted beans resemble arti- 

 ficial coffee beans composed of baked dough colored, but 

 a microscopical examination disproves this supposition. 

 The beans, are genuine coffee beans, but the cells show a 

 remarkable freedom from caffeine and the oil of coffee, 

 indicating that they had been steeped in water, so that on 

 the microscopical examination being supplemented by a 

 chemical analysis, the result showed that almost every 

 valuable property of the coffee had been removed from the 

 beans, evidently for medicinal purposes or the manufacture 

 of some extract of coffee, after which they are re-dried and 



