JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The beneficial effects of “coffee” had been  known in Ethiopia, and Arabia, and Persia, and Syria, and Turkey, long before it was used and enjoyed in the West. where coffee didn’t make a strong appearance until the 17th century.  Evidently, though it took nearly another hundred years for the first taxonomic description to appear. That was the work of  Antoine de Jussieu (1686-1750) , and his effort appeared tucked away in a short article “Histoire du Cafe”in the scientific journal Memoires de l’Academie des Sciences in 1713. 

The Jussieu is a coffee incunable in the Western world. It was described as “The first recorded taxonomic description of coffee…described a coffee plant from the botanical garden of Amsterdam as “Jasminum arabicanum, lauri folio, cujus femen apudnos coffee decir” in 1713 (“Arab jasmine, with laurel type leaves, the beans of which we can call coffee”)–(Wintgens, 2009, quoted by Caas Brazil, Coffee Taxonomy.) And although there isn’t an exact reference to the place of publication from what I can determine this must be the source–the article also uses a quote from the paper that is directly from this paper, which I reproduce above.  The Jussieu paper was also described as  “The first botanical description of a coffee tree, under the nam Jasminum arabicanum…made in 1713 by A. de Jussieu, who studied a single plant originating from the botanic garden of Amsterdam.” found in Charrier, A.; Berthaud, J.  “Botanical Classification of Coffee”, (1985), found in Clifford, M. H.; Wilson, K. C. Coffee: Botany, Biochemistry and Production of Beans and Beverage, AVI Publishing, p. 14. A wiki article on Jussieu references this paper but in a 1739 Paris edition of the 1713.  The 11-page article is also illustrated by an engraving of the coffee tree:

Notes: