use of the beverage, and also for promoting the propagation of the
plant, even if they found it in Abyssinia and brought it to Yemen.

Some authorities believe that the first cultivation of coffee in Yemen
dates back to 575 A.D., when the Persian invasion put an end to the
Ethiopian rule of the negus Caleb, who conquered the country in 525.

Certainly the discovery of the beverage resulted in the cultivation of
the plant in Abyssinia and in Arabia; but its progress was slow until
the 15th and 16th centuries, when it appears as intensively carried on
in the Yemen district of Arabia. The Arabians were jealous of their new
found and lucrative industry, and for a time successfully prevented its
spread to other countries by not permitting any of the precious berries
to leave the country unless they had first been steeped in boiling water
or parched, so as to destroy their powers of germination. It may be that
many of the early failures successfully to introduce the cultivation of
the coffee plant into other lands was also due to the fact, discovered
later, that the seeds soon lose their germinating power.

However, it was not possible to watch every avenue of transport, with
thousands of pilgrims journeying to and from Mecca every year; and so
there would appear to be some reason to credit the Indian tradition
concerning the introduction of coffee cultivation into southern India by
Baba Budan, a Moslem pilgrim, as early as 1600, although a better
authority gives the date as 1695. Indian tradition relates that Baba
Budan planted his seeds near the hut he built for himself at Chickmaglur
in the mountains of Mysore, where, only a few years since, the writer
found the descendants of these first plants growing under the shade of
the centuries-old original jungle trees. The greater part of the plants
cultivated by the natives of Kurg and Mysore appear to have come from
the Baba Budan importation. It was not until 1840 that the English began
the cultivation of coffee in India. The plantations extend now from the
extreme north of Mysore to Tuticorin.

_Early Cultivation by the Dutch_

In the latter part of the 16th century, German, Italian, and Dutch
botanists and travelers brought back from the Levant considerable
information regarding the new plant and the beverage. In 1614
enterprising Dutch traders began to examine into the possibilities of
coffee cultivation and coffee trading. In 1616 a coffee plant was
successfully tran