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, occurring 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 cultivation. From Arabia it was soon transplanted to other tropical countries.

The name coffee (Kaffee, Ger., Caffeier, Fr.) was supposed to have been derived from the Arabian word Kahwah 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 Abyssinian 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 supplying it to the dervishes to make them more enduring in their prayers and supplications. In 1511 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 judgment 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 bastinade 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 Venetian merchants brought large quantities of coffee into northern Italy. In 1632 there were 1,000 public coffee houses in Cairo. In 1645 coffee-drinking had already become very common in southern Italy. A Greek named Pasqua erected the first coffee house in London (1652). Coffee houses appeared in other cities in about the following order: Marseilles, 1671; Paris, 1672; Vienna, 1683; Nurnburg 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 were received. They were visited, not so much on account of the drink that was dispensed there, but rather for the purpose of discussing political situations; they constituted the favorite meeting-places for anarchists, revolutionaries, and high-class criminals. At times it even became necessary to close them entirely in order to check or suppress political intrigues or plottings against the government. At the present time the saloons take the place of coffee houses in most countries, and many of them are still the hotbeds of anarchy and crime. In Turkey, where alcoholic drinks are prohibited, coffee houses have full swing.

The Dutch again seemed to have been the first to attempt the cultivation of the coffee plant. In 1650 they succeeded in transplanting a few trees from Mecca to Batavia. From 1680 to 1690 the island already had large plantations; others were soon started in Ceylon, Surinam, and the Sunda islands. About 1713 Captain Desclieux carried some plants to the French possessions of the West Indies (Martinique). It is reported that only a single plant reached its destination alive, which is the ancestor of the coffee trees of the enormous plantations of the West Indies and South America.