ABSTRACT
John Houghton’s discourse on coffee was read at a meeting of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge in London on 14 June 1699, and printed in the Royal Society’s official publication, the Philosophical Transactions, in September 1699. His account differs from Sloane’s earlier botanical treatise in the same periodical, by focussing on the agricultural and economic aspects of coffee and the coffee-trade: in that sense it finds a location amongst the interests of the Royal Society’s Georgical Committee. The Discourse divides the topic into two sections. The first section Houghton later described as ‘the Temporal History of Coffee’: it is the most influential of the early histories of coffee in England, compiled from scholarly sources augmented with testimony from named eye-witnesses to the events it describes. In the second part, described as ‘the Natural’ history, Houghton describes the coffee bean and its uses, and has a ‘Chemist’ perform some rudimentary but robustly designed experiments comparing the chemical make-up of coffee, broad beans and wheat.
