Dufour concludes that the coffee beans of commerce are the same as the _bunchum_ (_bunn_) described by Avicenna and the _bunca_ (_bunchum_) of Rhazes. In this he agrees, almost word for word, with Rauwolf, indicating no change in opinion among the learned in a hundred years.
Christopher Campen thinks Hippocrates, father of medicine, knew and administered coffee.
Robinson, commenting upon the early adoption of coffee into materia medica, charges that it was a mistake on the part of the Arab physicians, and that it originated the prejudice that caused coffee to be regarded as a powerful drug instead of as a simple and refreshing beverage.
In early Grecian and Roman writings no mention is made of either the coffee plant or the beverage made from the berries. Pierre (Pietro) Delia Valle[28] (1586-1652), however, maintains that the _nepenthe_, which Homer says Helen brought with her out of Egypt, and which she employed as surcease for sorrow, was nothing else but coffee mixed with wine.[29] This is disputed by M. Petit, a well known physician of Paris, who died in 1687. Several later British authors, among them, Sandys, the poet; Burton; and Sir Henry Blount, have suggested the probability of coffee being the "black broth" of the Lacedæmonians.
George Paschius, in his Latin treatise of the _New Discoveries Made since the Time of the Ancients_, printed at Leipsic in 1700, says he believes that coffee was meant by the five measures of parched corn included among the presents Abigail made to David to appease his wrath, as recorded in the _Bible_, 1 Samuel, xxv, 18. The _Vulgate_ translates the Hebrew words _sein kali_ into _sata polentea_, which signify wheat, roasted, or dried by fire.
[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF DUFOUR'S BOOK, EDITION OF 1693]
Pierre Étienne Louis Dumant, the Swiss Protestant minister and author, is of the opinion that coffee (and not lentils, as others have supposed) was the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright; also that the parched grain that Boaz ordered to be given Ruth was undoubtedly roasted coffee berries.
Dufour mentions as a possible objection against coffee that "the use and eating of beans were heretofore forbidden by Pythagoras," but intimates that the coffee bean of Arabia is something different.