in botany, a genus of the diandra monogynia clas. The corolla has four segments, with oval laciniae; and the drupa contains one seed. There are two species.

This tree grows in the southern parts of France, in Spain, Italy, and other warm countries: with us it is usually preserved in the green-houses of the curious; though it will bear our ordinary winters in the open air, and produce very good fruit. Olives have an acrid, bitter, extremely disagreeable taste: pickled (as we receive them from abroad) they prove less disagreeable. The Lucca olives, which are smaller than the others, have the weakest taste; the Spanish, or larger, the strongest; the Provence, which are of a middling size, are generally the most esteemed.

The oil obtained from this fruit has no particular taste or smell, and does not greatly differ in quality from oil of almonds. Authors make mention of two sorts of this oil, one expressed from the olives when fully ripe, which is our common oil olive; the other, before it has grown ripe; this is called oleum immaturum, and emphacium. Nothing is met with in the shops under this name; and Lemery affirms, that there is no such oil, unripe olives yielding only a viscid juice to the press. From the ripe fruit, two or three sorts are obtained, differing in degree of purity; the purest runs by light pressure; the remaining magma, heated and pressed more strongly, yields an inferior sort, with some dregs at the bottom, called amurca. All these oils contain a considerable portion of aqueous moisture, and a mucilaginous substance; which subject them to run into a putrid state; to prevent this, the preparers add some sea salt, which imbibing the aqueous and mucilaginous parts, sinks with them to the bottom; by this means the oil becomes more homogeneous, and consequently less susceptible of alteration. In its passage to us, some of the salt, thrown up from the bottom by the shaking of the vessel, is sometimes mixed with and detained in the oil, which, in our colder climate, becomes too thick to suffer it freely to subside; and hence the oil is sometimes met with of a manifestly saline taste. Oil-olive is used in the simple balsam of sulphur, Locatelli's balsam, and several ointments. It is oftener employed in this last intention than the other expressed oils, but more rarely for internal medicinal purposes.