latter, especially, a large quantity of tannin.  Roasting renders volatile the essential oil of the coffee-berry.  The tea-leaf, infused for a short time, parts with its essential oil, and a small portion of alkaloid, (theine,) a good deal of which is thrown away with the grounds.  If it stands too long, or is boiled, more indeed is got out of it, but an astringent, disagreeable drink is the result.  The boiling of coffee extracts all its oil and alkaloid too, and, when it is drunk with the grounds, allows the whole nutriment to be available.  Even when strained, it is clearly more economical than tea.”

Roasted coffee is a powerful deodorizer, also.  This fact is familiarly illustrated by its use in bar-rooms; and it might be made available for other purposes.

The cost and vast consumption of coffee and tea have made the inducements to adulterate them very great.  The most harmless form, is the selling of coffee-grounds and old tea-leaves for fresh coffee and tea.  There is no security in buying coffee ready-ground; and we always look at the neat little packages of it in the grocers’ windows with a shudder.  Beans and peas we have certainly tasted in ground coffee.  The most fashionable adulteration, and one even openly vaunted as economical and increasing the richness of the beverage, is with the root of the wild endive, or chicory.  Roasted and ground, it closely resembles coffee.  It contains, however, none of the virtues of the latter, and has nothing to recommend it but its cheapness.  The leaves of the ash and the sloe are used to adulterate tea.  They merely dilute its virtues, without adding any that are worth the exchange.

The coffee-tree is a native of Ethiopia or Abyssinia.  Bruce tells us that the nomad tribes of that part of Africa carry with them, in crossing deserts on hostile expeditions, only balls of pulverized roasted coffee mixed with butter.  One of these as large as a billiard-ball keeps them, they say, in strength and spirits during a whole day’s fatigue, better than a loaf of bread or a meal of meat.  The Arabs gave the first written account of coffee, and first used it in the liquid form.  Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” mentions it as early as 1621.  “The Turks have a drink they call coffee, (for they use no wine,)—­so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter, which they sip up as warm as they can suffer, because they find by experience that that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity.”

The coffee-tree reaches a height of from six to twelve feet, and when fully grown much resembles the apple-tree.  Its leaves are green all the year; and in almost all seasons, blossoms and green and ripe fruit may be seen on the same tree at the same time.  When the blossom falls, there springs from it a small fruit, green at first, red when ripe, and under its flesh, instead of a stone, is the bean or berry we call coffee.  “It has but recently become known by Europeans