INTRODUCTION. 



oil is not mucli used as food : but in Italy and 

 Spain it takes the place of butter and cream. 

 Sir Francis Head relates that an English com- 

 pany was formed to supply the Spanish popula- 

 tion of Buenos Ayres with butter; but when 

 everything seemed to favour the scheme, the 

 speculators were thwarted by the discovery that 

 oil was infinitely preferred. Numerous passages 

 in the Scriptures, in which mention of oil occurs 

 in connection with corn and wine, prove that it 

 was a staple article of food in the East from the 

 remotest antiquity. Then, too, as now, it was 

 extensively used in medicine and surgery, and 

 among all civilised nations of the eastern con- 

 tinent the Olive has been regarded as the emblem 

 of peace. So highly did the Greeks value it, 

 that they ascribed its production to the tutelary 

 goddess of Athens, and pointed to the identical 

 tree which, as they pretended, sprung from the 

 ground at her bidding; and Pliny, the Roman 

 naturalist, pronounces it to be of greater value 

 than the vine. Pickled Olives are prepared from 

 unripe fruit, by soaking them in water, and then 

 bottling them in salt and water. It is singular, 

 that Evelyn, who could not have been aware of 

 the fact that the Olive and the Ash were kindred 

 genera, recommends the seed-vessels of the latter 

 tree to be treated similarly, for, being pickled 

 tender," he says, they afford a delicate salad- 

 ing." The custom of grafting the OHve, which, 

 according to Pliny, was as well knovrn to the 

 Romans in his day as it was when St. Paul ad- 

 dressed his epistle to the same people, is now 

 rarely if ever practised, it having been discovered 

 that the tree may readily be propagated by cuttings 



