Coffee, it has been proved, can be cultivated with great ease to any
extent in the republic of Liberia, being indigenous to the soil, and
found in great abundance. It bears fruit from thirty to forty years,
and yields 10 lbs. to the shrub yearly! A single tree in the garden of
Colonel Hicks, a colonist at Monrovia, is said to have yielded the
enormous quantity of 16 lbs. at one gathering. Judge Benson, in 1850,
had brought 25 acres under cultivation, and many others had also
devoted themselves to raising coffee. It was estimated there were
about 30,000 coffee trees planted in one of the counties, that of
Grand Bassa, and the quality of the produce was stated to be equal to
the best Java.

About the villages and settlements of the Sherbro river, and Sierra
Leone, wild coffee-trees are very abundant. In several parts of the
interior, the natives make use of the shrub to fence their
plantations.

Coffee has been successfully grown at St. Helena, of an excellent
quality, and might be made an article of export.

Portugal sent to the Great Exhibition, in 1851, a very valuable series
of coffees from many of her colonies; of ordinary description from St.
Thomas; tolerably good from the Cape de Verd islands; bad from Timor;
worse (but curious from the very small size of the berry) from
Mozambique; good from Angola; and excellent from Madeira.

Aden, alias Mocha coffee, is, along with the other coffees of the Red
Sea, sent first to Bombay by Arab ships, where it is "garbelled," or
picked, previously to its being exported to England.

An excellent sample of coffee, apparently of the Barbera (Abyssinia)
variety, was contributed to the Great Exhibition from Norfolk Island.
It was of good color, well adapted for roasting, and a most desirable
novelty from that quarter.

Dr. Gardner, of Ceylon, has taken out a patent for preparing the
coffee leaf in a manner to afford a beverage like tea, that is by
infusion, "forming an agreeable refreshing and nutritive article of
diet." An infusion of the coffee-leaf has long been an article of
universal consumption amongst the natives of parts of Sumatra;
wherever the coffee is grown, the leaf has become one of the
necessaries of life, which the natives regard as indispensable.

The coffee-plant, in a congenial soil and climate, exhibits great
luxuriance in its foliage, throwing out abundance of suckers and
lateral stems, especially when from any cause the main stem is thrown
out of th