: It is well known that the organic compounds, particularly carbohydrates, are fermented to volatile fatty acids in significant quantities under anaerobic conditions. There were, however, up to date not so many reports on the extraction and determination methods of organic acids in sea water and marine sediments.Then, the purpose of this work was focussed to study the methods for the extraction and also for the quantitative analysis of organic acids in sea water and marine sediments.The following results were concluded from the studies.( 1 ) The volatile fatty acids were quantitatively recovered with the silica gel chromatographic method using benzene-n-butyl alcohol (20%) as an eluting solvent.( 2 ) The organic acids added in the marine sediment were 87 to 90 per cent recovered by the three or four water extractions.( 3 ) The organic acids in sea water and in the extract of sediment were quickly extracted by 4 or 8 hour extraction with the continuous ether extractor presented in this paper.The present analytical method may have the advantages of higher accuracy and less time consumption than the other methods for determining organic acids in sea water and sediments.