[John Chamberlayne], The Natural History of Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Tobacco, with a Tract of Elder, and Juniper-Berries, shewing how useful they may be in our Coffee-houses, and also the way of making Mum, with some Remarks upon that Liquour. Collected from the Writings of the best Physicians, and Modern Travellers (London, Christopher Wilkinson, 1682), 36, [4]pp.; 4°. BL: 1038.i.48. ESTCR19385. Extract, pp. 3–7. Hünersdorff.

A 38-page quarto tract on the natural history of exotic beverages, compiled from relevant scholarly sources, but intended for a general audience. At the end of the book, the author defends his ‘little puny Pamphlet’ from the complaint that the ‘Histories are too short’, claiming that the book is ‘an Essay, or Topick, for Men to reason upon, when they meet together at Publick-Houses’ (p. 36, not reprinted here). The author takes a scholastic rather than empirical approach, surveying relevant authorities among travellers, botanists and physicians, and offering little original empirical research or observation. The book is perhaps based on, or a response to, the early compilation of coffee scholarship reprinted above, The Vertues of Coffee (1663, see pp. 75–84), or a translated redaction of foreign scholarship by Naironi and Spon (see below, pp. 113–41). Nonetheless, as some of the opinions surveyed here are both English and very recent (Willis, Munday), the book would seem to be the product of the author’s own scholarship. In addition to the five pages on coffee, the book offers separate sections, on tea (three pages), chocolate (five pages), tobacco (six pages), juniper and elderberry decoctions (six pages) and mum (five pages) – not included in the extract. The book has been attributed to John Chamberlayne (1668/9–1723), who translated and published The Manner of Making Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in 1685 aged sixteen years (see below, pp. 113–41). Whether he was also the author or compiler of this tract remains uncertain; in any case it would have been a work of some precocity, as he was only thirteen years of age when it was published in1041682. Hünersdorff claims that Blanche Henrey attributes the book to Richard Richardson (British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800, 3 vols (London, Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. I, p. 210), but Henrey makes no such claim. The book was published by Christopher Wilkinson (apprenticed 1657, died 1693), a bookseller and publisher whose shop was located ‘at the Black Boy over against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet’. The book was reviewed in Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious, 21 (Monday 5 June 1682), pp. 115–16. In 1684, a translation into German by the physician Johann Lange was published as Naturgemässe Beschreibung der Coffee, Thee, Chocolate, Tabacks (Hamburg, 1684); and in 1722, a translation into Danish as Den nyttige Sudheds-Brug over Coffee, Thee, Chocolate og Toback, Enebaer og Hyldebaer (Kobenhavn, 1722).