ABSTRACT
This is the first authoritative botanical description of coffee, using the principles of the New Science, published in Philosophical Transactions, the house journal of the Royal Society of London. It comprises a two-page prose botanical description of coffee by the young natural philosopher Hans Sloane, prepared from a dried specimen of the tree collected by Edward Clyve in Mocha, a port in Yemen. Sloane’s essay was in two parts: the first half a description of the ‘Cuntur of Peru’, or Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus), from a wing feather brought to London by Captain John Strong, obtained from a specimen shot by seamen on the coast of Chile. The second part concerns coffee: it describes the branch from the coffee tree in minute detail, adopting the attentive mode of empirical observation, and relates some information about its propagation (presumably derived from Clyve’s memorandums). The essay is supplemented by a large illustrative plate, depicting an engraved image of the branch by an unknown artist and engraver. The specimen collected by Clyve in Mocha survives in the Sloane Herbarium in the Natural History Museum, London, labelled ‘from Moca in Arabia Felix by Mr Clyve’. The specimen is amongst others collected by a ship’s surgeon called Handisyd in 1690–2 (J. E. Dandy (ed.), The Sloane Herbarium (London, British Museum, 1958), H.S.8, f. 93).In the late seventeenth century the imprecise knowledge about coffee became something of a scandal in botanical circles: although every coffee-house could furnish specimens of the beans, no European botanist had ever seen a live specimen of the plant from which they came. Without this information, coffee could not be classified correctly within botanical typologies. Writing his Historia Plantarum in 1685, John Ray asked his disciple Tancred Robinson to search for information concerning the coffee plant. Robinson’s reply confirmed that no secure information was extant, and that no ‘curious persons’ (botanists) had seen the coffee plant (John Ray, ‘Letter from Dr Tancred Robinson to Ray, from 144London, May 21, 1687’, The Correspondence of John Ray, ed. by Edwin Lankester (London, for the Ray Society, 1848), p. 190). The ground-breaking quality of Sloane’s description is its access to the specimen, a dried branch of the coffee tree.
