COFFEE. 



{Coffea Arabica L.) 



DR. ALBERT SCHNEIDER, 

 Northwestern University School of Pharmacy. 



•'Directly after coffee the band began to play." 



— Greville, Memoirs, June 5, 183 1. 



COFFEE is the seed of a small 

 evergreen tree or shrub ranging 

 from 15 to 25 feet in height. 

 The branches are spreading or 

 even pendant with opposite short 

 petioled leaves, which are ovate, 

 smooth, leathery, and dark green. 

 The flowers are perfect, fragrant, oc- 

 curring in groups of from three to 

 seven in the axils of the leaves. The 

 corolla is white, the calyx green and 

 small. The ovary is green at first, 

 changing to yellowish, and finally to 

 deep red or purple at maturity. Each 

 ovary has two seeds, the so-called 

 coffee beans. 



The coffee tree is a native of the 

 tropical parts of Africa, in Abyssinia 

 and the interior. The Arabians were 

 among the first to transport it to their 

 native country for the purposes of cul- 

 tivation. From Arabia it was soon 

 transplanted to other tropical coun- 

 tries. 



The name coffee {Kaffee, Ger., Caf- 

 fcier, Fr.) was supposed to have been 

 derived from the Arabian word Kah- 

 wah or Cahuah, which referred to the 

 drink made from the coffee beans as 

 well as to wines. It is now generally 

 believed that the word was derived 

 from Kaffa, a country of the Abyssin- 

 ian highlands where the plant grows 

 wild very abundantly. 



From Kaffa the coffee plant found 

 its way into Persia about the year 875, 

 and still later into Turkey. According 

 to popular belief, the drink coffee was 

 the invention of the Sheik Omar in 

 1258. Others maintain that the drink 

 was not known until even a later 

 period. The mufti, Gemal Eddin of 

 Aden, made a trip to Persia in 1500, 

 where he learned the use of coffee as 

 a drink, and introduced it into his own 

 country for the special purpose of sup- 



plying it to the dervishes to make 

 them more enduring in their prayers 

 and supplications. In 151 1 coffee had 

 already become a popular drink in 

 Mecca. About this time Chair Beg, 

 the governor of Mecca, issued an edict 

 proclaiming coffee-drinking injurious 

 and making the use of coffee a crime 

 against the laws of the Koran. It was 

 prophesied that on the day of judg- 

 ment the faces of coffee drinkers would 

 be blacker than the pot in which the 

 coffee was made. As a result of this 

 crusade the coffee houses were closed; 

 the coffee plantations were destroyed, 

 and offenders were treated to the bas- 

 tinade or a reversed ride on a donkey. 

 The next governor of Mecca again 

 opened the coffee houses, and in 1534 

 Sultan Soliman opened the first coffee 

 houses in Constantinople, which were, 

 however, again closed by Sultan Murad 

 II., but not for long. In 1624 Vene- 

 tian merchants brought large quan- 

 tities of coffee into northern Italy. In 

 1632 there were 1,000 public coffee 

 houses in Cairo. In 1645 coffee-drink- 

 ing had already become very common 

 in southern Italy. A Greek named 

 Pasqua erected the first coffee house 

 in London (1652). Coffee houses ap- 

 peared in other cities in about the fol- 

 lowing order: Marseilles, 1671 ; Paris, 

 1672; Vienna, 1683; Niirnburg and 

 Regensburg, 1686; Hamburg, 1687; 

 Stuttgart, 1712; Berlin, 1721. In 1674 

 the ladies of London petitioned the 

 government to suppress the coffee 

 houses. To discourage the use of 

 coffee it was maintained that the drink 

 was made from tar, soot, blood of Turks, 

 old shoes, old boots, etc. 



These coffee houses were of great 

 significance, as may be gathered from 

 the rapidity with which they spread 

 and the general favor with which they 



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