pen the Exchange coffee
house in the Bingham mansion on Third Street. He even solicited
subscriptions to the enterprise, saying that he proposed to keep a
marine diary and a registry of vessels for sale, to receive and to
forward ships' letter bags, and to have accommodations for holding
auctions. But he was persuaded from the idea, partly by the fact that
the Merchants coffee house seemed to be satisfactorily filling that
particular niche in the city life, and partly because the hotel business
offered better inducements. He abandoned the plan, and opened the
Mansion House hotel in the Bingham residence in 1807.

[Illustration: EXCHANGE COFFEE HOUSE SCENE IN "HAMILTON"

In this setting for the first act of the play by Mary P. Hamlin and
George Arliss, produced in 1918, the scenic artist aimed to give a true
historical background, and combined the features of several inns and
coffee houses in Philadelphia, Virginia, and New England as they existed
in Washington's first administration]

CHAPTER XV

THE BOTANY OF THE COFFEE PLANT

_Its complete classification by class, sub-class, order, family,
genus, and species--How the Coffea arabica grows, flowers, and
bears--Other species and hybrids described--Natural caffein-free
coffee--Fungoid diseases of coffee_

The coffee tree, scientifically known as _Coffea arabica_, is native to
Abyssinia and Ethiopia, but grows well in Java, Sumatra, and other
islands of the Dutch East Indies; in India, Arabia, equatorial Africa,
the islands of the Pacific, in Mexico, Central and South America, and
the West Indies. The plant belongs to the large sub-kingdom of plants
known scientifically as the Angiosperms, or _Angiospermae_, which means
that the plant reproduces by seeds which are enclosed in a box-like
compartment, known as the ovary, at the base of the flower. The word
Angiosperm is derived from two Greek words, _sperma_, a seed, and
_aggeion_, pronounced angeion, a box, the box referred to being the
ovary.

This large sub-kingdom is subdivided into two classes. The basis for
this division is the number of leaves in the little plant which develops
from the seed. The coffee plant, as it develops from the seed, has two
little leaves, and therefore belongs to the class _Dicotyledoneae_. This
word _dicotyledoneae_ is made up of the two Greek words, _di(s)_, two,
and _kotyledon_, cavity or socket. It is not necessary to see the young
plant that develops fr