A preparation which has considerable vogue with lovers of ripe olives is to take the olives from the brine some hours before using and cover them with olive oil. This preparation may be further enhanced by rubbing the dish before using, with a cut clove of garlic. The use of aromatics in the preliminary preparation, then packing in oil, as done by the Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards, with some of their best olives, produce very fine products that are far ahead, in both flavor and food value, of the ordinary preparations. The olive, though used almost exclusively as a relish or appetizer in this country, is a valuable food. This is true for both the green and the ripe, the difference in the two not being so great as is frequently claimed. The pickled green olive has supplanted the cucumber pickle to a very considerable extent in the trade. The canned ripe olive is distinctive and depends upon an entirely different quality for its favor. As long as the present prices prevail, they can not be considered on the basis of staples or in competition with many other foods in furnishing nutritive elements. The flesh of the American olive consists of about 80 per cent of the fruit, and of this the solids average 38 per cent, oil 25 per cent, and protein 1.2 per cent. In spite of the fact that olives have been used as a food from time immemorial, very little systematic analytic work seems to have been done on the whole fruit in the various stages of maturity and in determining the effect of the various treatments for the removal of the bitterness. Much of the analytic work has been devoted to analyses of the oil and to methods for determining adulteration. The methods followed in this country and abroad are not the same and the results are therefore not comparable. It seems strange that so old and so commercially important a fruit has not been investigated to the minutest detail.