11 



Governor- General of India, Van Hoorne, caused some ripe 

 coffee-seeds to be brought to Java ; they were planted, grew, 

 and produced fruit. He sent a single plant home from 

 Batavia to Nicholas Witsen, the Governor of the East India 

 Company, which arrived safe, was planted in the Botanic 

 Gardens of Amsterdam, where it prospered, produced fruit, 

 and the fruit young plants. From the Amsterdam garden 

 plants were sent to the Dutch colony of Surinam, and the 

 planters entered on the cultivation of coffee in 1718. The 

 authority for this is the celebrated physician and botanist, 

 Boerhaave, in his Index of the Leyden Garden. In ten 

 years after its cultivation in Surinam it was introduced from 

 that colony by the English into Jamaica. It was sent to 

 Martinique from France in 1720. The first coffee-plant cul- 

 tivated in Brazil, now the greatest producing country in the 

 world, was reared by a Franciscan monk, of the name of 

 Vellosa, in the garden of the convent of San Antonio, near 

 Bio Janeiro ; it throve, and the monk presented its ripe fruit 

 to the .viceroy, Lavrado. He judiciously distributed it to the 

 planters, who commenced its cultivation in 1774. From 

 Java the coffee-plant was conveyed to Sumatra, to Celebes, to 

 the Philippines, and in our own times to Malabar, Mysore, 

 and Ceylon. The few coffee-berries brought from Mocha to 

 Batavia are the parents of the vast quantity now produced, 

 all the coffee now consumed (exceeding 500,000,000 Ibs.), 

 save the trifle yielded by Arabia, has the same origin, and 

 the great cultivation and commerce in coffee has all sprung 

 up in less than one hundred and seventy-five years. 



