James Douglas, Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofe ferens: or, a Description and History of the Coffee Tree (London, Thomas Woodward, 1727) [2], ii, 60pp.; 2°. BL: 34.g.7(1). ESTCT22346. Extract, pp. i–ii, 12–22. Hünersdorff.

An extract from James Douglas’s prestigious folio publication on the botany of the coffee tree. Douglas’s work on coffee began in 1725 with a 22-page botanical and historical analysis of the coffee bean appended to Lilium Sarniense: or, A Description of the Guernsay-Lilly; to which is added The Botanical Dissection of the Coffee-Berry (London, G, Strahan, 1725). This work on coffee is substantially repeated and elaborated in his later publications. His main study on coffee, Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofè ferens, followed in 1727, with a separately issued Supplement (see below, pp. 219–76) published in the same year. Further studies of chocolate and tea were prepared, but not published. Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofè ferens comprises five sections, of which the third is included here. He begins with a list of the diverse names given to the coffee drink, the coffee bean and the coffee plant derived from the various authors who have written on it (finding 29 different names for the drink, 39 names for the bean, and 27 for the tree). The second section on the etymology of these names complains that many descriptions of coffee confuse the name of the bean with that of the plant: his example is the description of the coffee plant by Ray, of which he says ‘Never was there a List of Synonyma compiled with less Judgment than this’. Douglas decides firmly that ‘The fruit is called Buun; and the Tree, the Buun Tree’ (p. 10, not reprinted here). Coffee and all the versions of that word (such as coava or kauhi), he decides, refer solely to the drink or liquor, and are derived from the Turkish word cahveh and from the Arabic Cahouah. After the third chapter on the natural origins of coffee in Yemen, a series of chapters offer Douglas’s botanical observations on the coffee plant (variously its trunk, leaves, flower and fruit) before finishing with a chapter on ‘The Culture of the Coffee Plant in England’, in which he defers to Bradley (see above pp. 165–200). In each chapter, Douglas proceeds by a combination of scholasticism and empiricism: first surveying extant knowledge and secondly offering his own observations, where possible.