"What moral lessons to the Chinese these
struggles of new customs are! Were nectar
introduced to-morrow to supersede tea, the same
old story would be repeated.

Coffee was not introduced into France until
twelve years after its first use in England. In
1662, Thevenot, the Asiatic traveller, brought
it to Paris, then heedless of its good fortune.
It soon spread among the gay natives, but it
had its enemies—the friends of beer, wine, and
old customs. Delightful Madame de Sévigné,
who died in 1696, used to predict that Racine
and coffee would both soon be forgotten; but
coffee "avait les racines trop profonds et tout
le monde sait le profondeur de Racine."

In spite of the venerable Arabian goat story,
the real inventor of coffee was the great creature
who first thought of roasting the berry.
It is this process of carbonisation that developes
the aroma and generates the oil. To make good
coffee the operator must act (however
unconsciously) on three grand principles of medicine
and chemistry.

He must first learn that exact moment in
roasting, when the odoriferous principle shall be
at its climax, lest a livelier heat dissipate it for
ever. He must obtain the liquid so concentrated
that it contains unimpaired all that aroma
which is its life and soul. He must carry on
his manufacture, so that all the final principles
of the berry, the harsh and astringent properties,
shall remain undeveloped and unmixed with
its finer essence.

These are great chemical principles which
require a theoretical knowledge and a learned
experience not to be expected from a mere
hireling cook. Endless experiments have been
made with coffee, to extract its full power and
yet repress its baser properties. All sorts of
finings have been used, beginning with
soleskins. It has been made without roasting the
berry—without crushing the berry—with cold
water—it has been made by boiling for three-
quarters of an hour, &c. As the Japanese
differ from us in grinding their tea (a very
great economy), so the Turks differ from us
in pounding their coffee. They do not use a
grinding mill, but wooden mortars and wooden
pestles, and the drier these instruments are,
and the more impregnated with the aroma,
the more valuable they are considered. Those
of our readers who have gone up the Nile,
will remember that dull continuous thump
which used to rouse them from their narrow
beds, at that early hour when the long files of
cranes and wild geese on the low sandy shore,
drawn up as if for inspection by the king of
the birds, all looked like flamingoes in the rosy
light of daybreak, that turned the pyramids
long left behind, to little triangles of pale ruby.
If they then peeped out at the front cabin
door they will remember that while half the
crew were in the Nile up to their black chins,
shoving the dahabeeah off one of the incessant
sandbanks, Achmed, the ship's boy, a great
lubberly stalwart fellow of seventeen, was
sitting crosslegged in the head of the boat, with
a wooden mortar between his knees, and that
he held in his dusky hands, a small tree five
feet long, rounded to a club at one end, with
which he was pounding the close-grained berries.

Brillat-Savarin, tried the Turkish plan of
pounding coffee, and found the result far
preferable to coffee which had been ground. To
illustrate the strange and unaccountable effects
of different modes of chemical manipulation, he
tells, in his suggestive way, an anecdote.

Napoleon (the Great Napoleon), like most
Frenchmen, was fond of eau sucrée (sugar water.)
"Monsieur," he said one day, to the
celebrated chemist Laplace, "how is it that a glass
of water in which I melt a lump of sugar, seems
to me so much better than that in which I
have put the same quantity of crushed sugar?"
"Sire," replied the savant, "there are three
substances of which the bases are exactly the
same. Sugar, gum, and amidon. They only
differ in certain conditions, the secret of which
is reserved by nature. I think it is
possible that in the collision of the crusher some
portions of sugar pass to the condition of gum,
and cause the difference which you have
observed."

Crushing coffee in the same way may produce
some slight but beneficial change—may expel
some element, or call forth some essence, which
the grinding wheel does not affect.

Brillat-Savarin, after trying many ways of
making coffee, settled down on a sort of
percolator, the Dubelloy. His principle was to
pour boiling water through coffee lightly placed
in a porcelain or silver vessel pierced with fine
holes. The first decoction was then heated to
ebullition, passed again through the coffee, and
a clear and rich brown liquid obtained with as
full an aroma, and as near perfection as possible.

Dr. Forbes's plan (patronised by Mr. Walker,
of the Original) was not very dissimilar. He
first selected coffee imported in small parcels,
coffee in bulk often heating and becoming
impaired. Coffee should always be roasted and
ground on the day when it is used, and when
that is not possible it should be kept in a glass
bottle with a ground stopper. The best mode of
roasting, is in a frying-pan over the fire, or in
an earthen basin placed in an open oven: the
berries to be frequently stirred. The flavour of
the coffee roasted in this exposed way, is said to
be finer than that of coffee roasted in a closed
cylinder. Dr. Forbes used a biggin with two
cylinders—the one above the filter, the other
below the receptacle. It was first rinsed with
hot water, then the coffee powder was put in:
a full ounce for every two cups. The measured
boiling water was poured lightly in, through
a movable colander. As soon as it had run
through, the clear bright coffee was ready.

The French heat their coffee, when filtered,
to boiling point, then fine it with fish-skins.
The water they use, is generally first mixed with
coffee grounds and boiled: otherwise it remains
raw, and the infusion is not perfect. It is attention
to these thoughtful refinements that makes
French coffee so good; it is a stupid neglect
of them that makes ours so bad. The rude
process of making tea, the mere splashing in of