The exact date when the City tavern became the Merchants coffee house is unknown. When James Kitchen became proprietor, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was so called. In 1806 Kitchen turned the house into a bourse, or mercantile exchange. By that time clubs and hotels had come into fashion, and the coffee-house idea was losing caste with the élite of the city.
In the year 1806 William Renshaw planned to open 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]
_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 _Angiospermæ_, 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.