The earliest notice I can find of coffee in India is contained in a Dutch work entitled “Letters from Malabar,” by Jacob Canter Visscher, chaplain at Cochin.  This collection of letters has been translated by Major Drury, or rather at his instance, and as the date of the Dutch editor’s preface is 1743, it is evident that the coffee plant must have at least been introduced five or six years earlier, but the date of its introduction is not mentioned, and we are merely informed, at page 160, that “the coffee shrub is planted in gardens for pleasure and yields plenty of fruit, which attains a proper degree of ripeness.  But it has not the refined taste of the Mocha coffee....  An entire new plantation has been laid out in Ceylon.”  The plant, however, though introduced at that early period, does not seem to have met with much attention in India, and I can find no other allusion to coffee in Indian books till we come to Heyne’s Tracts, which were published in 1800, and we are there merely told that coffee was sold in the bazaars of Bangalore and Seringapatam.

Turning next to the history of coffee in Mysore, we find that there is no official record of either plant or planting further back than the year 1822, which is not very surprising, as it was only placed under British rule in 1831; but tradition in these cases seldom fails to supply some story which is suitable enough, and it may after all be quite true that, as reported, a Mussulman pilgrim, about two hundred years ago, returned from Arabia with seven beans which he planted round his mutt (temple) on the Bababudan hills in the northern part of Mysore, near which some very old trees may still be seen, and that from these beans all the coffee in Mysore has descended.  But, though the plant may have been introduced at this early period, I think it improbable that anything in the shape of plantations existed before about the close of the last century.  And, though the plant has been known for such a number of years, it is not a little remarkable that coffee has only come into use by the natives who grow it in recent years, and when I first settled in Mysore, in 1856, I was repeatedly asked by the farmers of the country whether we ate the berry, and of what use it could possibly be.  And even now, from all that I can learn, coffee is rarely used by the natives in the coffee growing districts, though I am informed that it is so to a considerable extent in the towns of the province.

I have alluded to the tradition of coffee being first introduced into Mysore by a Mussulman pilgrim about two hundred years ago, and the species of coffee that was introduced then, or at some subsequent period, was the only one known in Mysore when I entered the province in 1855.  This plant was finally called the “Chick” variety of coffee, and the name was taken, I believe, from the town of Chickmaglur, which lies close to the original Mysore home of the coffee plant.  This variety had thriven well and