James Douglas, A Supplement to the Description of the Coffee-Tree, lately published by Dr. Douglas (London, Thomas Woodward, 1727), [2], 54pp. BL: 34.g.7.(2). ESTCT48943.

James Douglas’s third publication on coffee, building on his botanical description of the coffee-bean (Lilium Sarniense: or, A Description of the Guernsay-Lilly; to which is added the botanical dissection of the coffee-berry (London, G. Strahan, 1725)) and the coffee tree (Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofe ferens, see above, pp. 201–17). The Supplement, which was also published in 1727, brings a scientific rigour to the historical analysis of coffee and its consumption in the Levant and in Europe. Douglas adopts a cool and empirical tone, judiciously analysing the extant evidence so as to identify and resolve contradictions and anomalies. Despite this empirical structure, the Supplement is essentially antiquarian and scholastic, a summary of the research of others, rather than the product of his own research. The exceptions to this are his interviews with the coffee-men of London, especially George Constantine and Walter Elford, proprietors of long-established coffee-houses in the city. The Supplement begins with an assessment of European scholarship on the history of coffee consumption in the Levant. As well as the well-established canon of European travel accounts, botanical tracts and medical treatises, Douglas makes extensive use of Ottoman sources, where available in translation (pp. 223–48). The second section surveys the importation of coffee drinking and the emergence of coffee-houses in Christian Europe: Douglas argues for the precedence of the English over the French, while admitting that Italian coffee-houses in Venice and Livorno may pre-date both. The final sections offers a survey of the international trade in coffee (pp. 263–8), a guide to buying coffee-beans on the domestic market (pp. 268–72), and finally an analysis of the mistaken but oft-repeated seventeenth-century discussion on whether the germinative faculty of coffee-beans was deliberately destroyed by Arab farmers before coffee-beans were exported from Yemen (pp. 273–6). Douglas’s measured tone ensured that his account has often been appealed to as an authority. Like Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofè ferens, the Supplement was 220published in a prestigious folio format by Thomas Woodward, the bookseller and stationer active between 1713 and 1745, who operated from a shop near Temple Bar at the Half-Moon over-against St Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street. Although Woodward published few books, he was responsible for several important botanical publications. The James Douglas papers in the University of Glasgow contain an extensive 268-page manuscript entitled ‘A history of the use of coffee’ in the hand of George Douglas, James Douglas’s amanuensis (GB 0247 MS Hunter D408).