COFFEE PRICES SINCE 1845. 165 
the aromatic substance more than the fourth part con- 
tained in the roasted coffee. 
** The beverage, when ready, ought to be of a brown 
black colour; untransparent it always is, somewhat 
like chocolate thinned with water ; and this want of 
clearness in coffee so prepared does not come from 
the fine grounds, but from a peculiar fat resembling 
butter, about 12 per cent of which the berries con- 
tain, and which, if over roasted, is partly destroyed. 
In the other methods of making coffee, more than 
half the valuable pirt of the berries remains in the 
‘grounds’ and is lost. 
‘* To judge as favourably of my coffee as I do my- 
self, its taste is not compared with that of the ordin- 
ary beverage, but rather the good effects might be 
taken into consideration which my coffee has on the 
organism. Many persons, too, who connect the idea 
of strength or concentration with a dark or black 
colour, fancy my coffee to be thin and weak, but 
these were at once inclined more fivourably, directly 
I gave it a dark colour by means of burnt sugar, or 
by adding some substitute. The real flavour of coffee 
is so little known to most persons, that many who 
drank my coffee for the first time doubted of its 
goodness, because it tasted of the berries. A coffee, 
however, which has not the flavour of the berry, is no 
coffee but an artificial beverage, for which many other 
things may be substituted at pleasure. Hence it comes 
that if to the decoction made from roasted chicory, 
carrots, or beetroot, the slightest quantity of coffee 
be added, few persons detect the difference. This 
accounts for the great diffusion of each such substi- 
tute. A dark mixture, with an empyreumatical taste, 
most people fancy to be coffee. For tea there are 
ie substitutes, as everybody knows what real tea is 
ike:”’ 
COFFEE PRICES SINCE 1845. 
These are given in the tables which the Hconomiést 
prints with its Commercial Review for 1871. For the 
sake of uniformity, Jamaica fine ordinary to fine is 
taken as the standard, as, in 1845, Ceylon coffee in- 
stead of having established its character as the best 
in the market was ranked amongst the worst. The 
general result for the period embraced is that prices 
have risen from an average of 45s to 54s per cwt. 
in the years 1845-50, to 67s on Ist January 1872, an 
advance of 18s over the average of the two extremes 
of 1845-50, of 23s over the lowest price then, and 
of 133 over the highest. The fluctuations in the in- 
