CORRESPONDENCE OF RAY. 193 



Dr. ROBINSON to Mr. RAY. 



SIR, Monsieur Bernier, who passed the Red Sea into 

 Arabia, doth affirm in a private letter, that the Arabs 

 assured him that the coffee fruit was sown every year 

 under trees, up which it did climb and run, from which 

 he concludes it to be a species of Convolvulus. I think 

 he might as well have concluded it to be a Phaseolus, or 

 some other scan dent legume. If M. Bernier was truly in- 

 formed of its annual sowing and climbing, then Alpinus- 

 never saw the true coffee plant. The Arabians are as 

 careful-4, destroying the germinating faculty of the coffee 

 fruit or seed, by boiling or burning, as the Dutch of the 

 Moluccas are in their nutmegs. I have spoke with several 

 curious persons that have been several times in Egypt, 

 and they all said that they never saw the coffee plant; 

 neither, as I remember, did Bellonius ever meet with it 

 in that country or Arabia ; for the coffee is said only to 

 grow in that part of Arabia that lies within the tropic. 



I have examined many coffee berries, as they call them, 

 here at London, and am almost persuaded by my own 

 observation, that they are neither berries nor the seeds 

 of any Convolvulus, nor of any legume, but are rather of 

 the nut kind : the entire fruit is covered with two skins, 

 being round on one side and flat on the other ; the exte- 

 rior skin, or rather shell, being as thick almost as that of 

 a pistachio, is of a dark colour ; the second, or interior 

 membrane, that covers the kernels, is much finer and of 

 a yellowish -white colour, as the kernels themselves are. 

 Under this second skin lies generally two kernels, some- 

 times one, round on one side and flat on the other : on 

 the flat side of the kernel there is always a slit, or a 

 mouth, so that every kernel doth exactly resemble a 

 Concha Veneris. The fruit doth generally come to us 

 decorticated, but I, finding some entire, have made this 

 description. 



London, May 21, 87. 



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