176 



The World's Commercial Products 



A LIBERIAN COFFEE PLANT IN FLOWER 



became pre-eminent, 

 to be in turn abso- 

 lutely beaten by 

 Brazil, which at the 

 present time pro- 

 duces some three- 

 quarters of the 

 world's total supply, 

 and controls the 

 market. 



The history of 

 coffee cultivation in 

 Ceylon, to which we 

 shall refer again 

 later, affords a good 

 illustration of these 

 variations in fortune. 

 In 1880 coffee was the 

 principal crop of the 

 colony, and worth 

 some £3,000,000 

 annually. The at- 

 tacks of a micro- 

 scopic fungus ruined 

 the plants, and the 

 industry within a 

 comparatively few 

 years became of 

 quite minor import- 

 ance, and the annual 

 crop is now worth 

 only about £25,000 

 — a drop in value 

 of £2,975,000 in less 

 than thirty years. 



THE COFFEE PLANT 



The coffee plant belongs to the genus Coffea of the natural order Rubiaceae, an assemblage 

 of plants including also the cinchonas, which yield quinine ; gambier, furnishing the tanning 

 material and dye of the same name ; madder, and other useful plants. The order is most 

 abundantly represented in the tropics, and our British representatives — the bed-straws, 

 goose-grass, and madder — do not possess the characteristic features of their relatives of the 

 warmer regions of the world. Altogether there are about eighty recognised species of Coffea, 

 of which only two are cultivated to any great extent, namely Arabian Coffee {Coffea 

 arabica) and Liberian Coffee (C. liberica). 



Arabian and Liberian Coffee 



The beautiful Arabian coffee plant is a shrub attaining a height of fifteen or eighteen feet. 

 Its leaves are of a fresh green colour, three to four inches in length, pointed and borne in pairs 



