The Caledonian

Tea-Coffee-Tobacco.—Three plants, at this moment connect three different quarters of the world, which for ages would have known but little of each other without them.—China is connected with England with scarcely any other link than her tea ; for three hundred years tobacco was the sole link between England and the Western world ;and Arabia is to this hour scarcely bound to us but by her coffee. Such are the slender but powerful sources of national connexion. The discovery of coffee was not made until the latter part of the thirteenth century, and, like many another great discovery, it was the result of chance, adopted by necessity. An Arab, the Sheykh Omar, fell under persecution in his own country; he and his disciples fled to a mountain in the province of Yemen, where, in the desert, all usual food failed him; a coffee berry there grew wild, and the distressed refugee, as it was too hard for him to masticate, tried its effect in boiling; he drank the liquor, found himself revived, and made it immortal. Yet, recommended as it was by its refreshing properties, its spontaneous growth:, and still more, such is the absurdity of mankind, by the example of a fool or knave, who called himself a saint, coffee took upwards of two centuries to make its way into the world. Even in its country it was a dishonored as a prophet among his kindred ; and as near as Egypt was, it was not till the third century from its discovery that it insinuated itself into the sober potations of Egypt. It is seldom that the world is indebted to superstition for any thing except carnivals and cardinals, but the follies of the Arab devotees in the land of the Pharaohs, who win golden opinions of men by extravagances that would degrade the mules they ride on, were the first parentage of Egyptian coffee-drinking. Those wretched people, spending half their nights in watching, and half their existence in mortifying the withered flesh on their tawny bodies, found coffee essential to keep their bodies and souls together. The Turk next adopted it. It suited his laziness, his lassitude, his sedentariness, and his stupidity. The showy barbarian wanted nothing but tobacco to complete the curse which, to the slave and the sensualists, turns all the enjoyment of the senses into evil Tobacco came to add his catalogue of wilful calamities. It is a remarkable instance of the perversity of the human will when left to itself, that while coffee, with all its singular power of cheering the mind and refreshing the nerves, took nearly four hundred years to make itself known in Europe, and while the potato is scarcely more than coming into use in a large portion of the Continent, tobacco took little more than half-a-dozen years to be known as far as ships could carry it: that is now the favorite filth of every savage lip within the circumference of the globe: that it fills the atmosphere of the Continent with a perpetual stench : that the Spaniards suck it as he says, for the heat— the Dutchman for the cold—the Frenchman because he has nothing else to do—the German because he will do nothing else—the London apprentice because 'it makes him look like a gentleman,' and all because it is in its own nature the filthiest, most foolish, dullest, and most disgusting practice on the face of the earth. [Blackwood.