INTRODUCTION INTO EUROPE. 



brought to Spain from South America. Coffee followed, 

 coming from Arabia, and Tea, the latest of the series, 

 coming from China by the hands of the Portuguese. 



The first authentic mention made of Coffee or its 

 use by a European is probably that of Rauwolf, a Ger- 

 man physician and traveler, upon his return from an 

 extended tour through Syria, in 1573. The first scien- 

 tific account of the plant being that given by Alpinus, 

 an Italian naturalist, in his Medicina Egyptorium, pub- 

 lished in Venice in 1591. Its use as a beverage is first 

 referred to by two English travelers Biddulph and 

 Finch the former, in writing of it in 1603, stating " that 

 the Turks have for their most common drink Coffee 

 a blackish drink made from a kind of pulse-like 

 pease, and called by them Coava!' In 1607 Finch 

 relates that " the people of the island Socotra have for 

 their best entertainment a China dish called Cobo^ a black, 

 bitterish drink, made of a berry very like a bay-berry, 

 brought from Moka, and supped off hot." While Pietro 

 Valla, a Venetian, in a letter written from Constantinople, 

 in 161 5, states that upon his return to Venice "he would 

 bring back with him some coffee which he believed was 

 a thing heretofore unknown in his country," and which 

 he subsequently did. It is also referred to, in 162 1, by 

 Burton in his " Anatomy of Melancholy " as follows : 

 " The Turks have a drink called Coffee, so named from a 

 berry, black as soot and as bitter, which they sip up hot, 

 because they find by experience that that kind of drink, 

 so used, helpeth digestion and promoteth alacrity." And 

 coffee in a liquid state is said to have been sold in Rome 

 as early as 1625. Some of the prepared beans of Coffee 

 were first carried from Turkey to France by De la Haye, 

 as early as 1644 ; "not only coffee, but also the proper 

 apparatus for preparing it." In 1657 a small quantity 



