=Maté or Paraguay Tea= (_Ilex paraguayensis_), a species of holly growing in Paraguay and south Brazil, which furnishes the chief non-alcoholic drink of South America. Though used immemorially by the Indians, the tree was first cultivated by the Jesuits. The dried leaves are packed in scrons or raw hides containing about two hundred pounds each. The infusion is prepared in a calabash or maté, usually silver-mounted, boiling water and sugar, with milk or lemon-juice, being added to the leaves (yerba), and the beverage taken very hot through a metal or reed tube or bombilla with a strainer at one end. Maté contains 1.85 per cent of caffein, acting as a restorative, much as tea does; but, being bitter, the taste for it has to be acquired.
=Mulberry= (_Morus_), allied to the nettle, hemp, and elm families. The BLACK MULBERRY, mainly cultivated for its fruit, is perhaps a native of Armenia, but was early introduced into Greece, where its leaves are still used for feeding silkworms. The Asiatic species, or the WHITE MULBERRY, of which there are numerous varieties, mostly with white fruit, is that mainly cultivated in Japan, China, India and Italy for the silkworm. The fibrous inner bark of the PAPER MULBERRY is made into paper by the Chinese and Japanese, and into tapa cloth in the South Sea Islands. The so-called fruit is formed from a whole cluster of flowers which become fleshy, turn color and sweeten while they enlarge until they meet those of the other flowers, enclosing the true fruits, small dry capsules. Extensively grown for market near large cities in Europe and the United States.
=Nutmeg= (_Myristica fragrans_), an evergreen tree native to the East Indies, and now in cultivation in the East and West Indies and Brazil. The fruit is pear-shaped and about two inches across. The seed has a thin, hard shell enclosing the nutmeg, which is mottled in appearance. The largest and roundest nutmegs are the best, and though generally about one hundred and ten to the pound, they may be as few as sixty-eight. Nutmegs contain about twenty-five per cent of nutmeg butter or oil of mace, a vegetable fat now considerably employed in soap-making.
=Olive= (_Olea europæa_), a very valuable small tree, seldom more than thirty feet high, of slow growth, but sometimes exceeding twenty feet in girth and seven centuries in age. The wild olive has squarish, spinous branches; opposite evergreen, leathery, shortly-stalked leaves, hoary on their under surface, and small white flowers. The cultivated olive (var. _sativa_) differs in its rounder branches which have no spines, longer leaves and larger fruit. For pickling, the fruits are gathered unripe, soaked in an alkaline lye, and then bottled in brine. For oil, the ripe fruit, which usually yields sixty to seventy per cent, is squeezed, yielding virgin oil, and the marc or cake is wetted and re-pressed, and the kernels crushed and boiled to yield a second and third quality. The tree grows best on light or calcareous soils near the sea, and the value attached to its oil as an article of food in countries where butter can with difficulty be preserved made the tree from early times the symbol of peace and good-will. It is extensively cultivated in Mediterranean Europe, Syria, South Africa, Australia and California.