_China_ cups,
as hot as they can; they put it often to their lips but drink but
little at a time, and let it go round as they sit.

In this same water they take a fruit called _Bunnu_ which in its
bigness, shape and color is almost like unto a bayberry, with two
thin shells surrounded, which, as they informed me, are brought
from the _Indies_; but as these in themselves are, and have within
them, two yellowish grains in two distinct cells, and besides,
being they agree in their virtue, figure, looks, and name with the
_Bunchum_ of _Avicenna_, and _Bunca_, of _Rasis ad Almans_ exactly;
therefore I take them to be the same, until I am better informed by
the learned. This liquor is very common among them, wherefore there
are a great many of them that sell it, and others that sell the
berries, everywhere in their _Batzars_.

_The Early Days of Coffee in Italy_

It is not easy to determine just when the use of coffee spread from
Constantinople to the western parts of Europe; but it is more than
likely that the Venetians, because of their close proximity to, and
their great trade with, the Levant, were the first acquainted with it.

Prospero Alpini (Alpinus; 1553-1617), a learned physician and botanist
of Padua, journeyed to Egypt in 1580, and brought back news of coffee.
He was the first to print a description of the coffee plant and drink in
his treatise _The Plants of Egypt_, written in Latin, and published in
Venice, 1592. He says:

I have seen this tree at Cairo, it being the same tree that
produces the fruit, so common in Egypt, to which they give the name
_bon_ or _ban_. The Arabians and the Egyptians make a sort of
decoction of it, which they drink instead of wine; and it is sold
in all their public houses, as wine is with us. They call this
drink _caova_. The fruit of which they make it comes from "Arabia
the Happy," and the tree that I saw looks like a spindle tree, but
the leaves are thicker, tougher, and greener. The tree is never
without leaves.

Alpini makes note of the medicinal qualities attributed to the drink by
dwellers in the Orient, and many of these were soon incorporated into
Europe's materia medica.

Johann Vesling (Veslingius; 1598-1649), a German botanist and traveler,
settled in Venice, where he became known as a learned Italian physician.
He edited (1640) a new edition of Alpini'