  Starting with a two-body effective nucleon-nucleon interaction, it is shown
that the infinite nuclear matter model of atomic nuclei is more appropriate
than the conventional Bethe-Weizsacker like mass formulae to extract saturation
properties of nuclear matter from nuclear masses. In particular, the saturation
density thus obtained agrees with that of electron scattering data and the
Hartree-Fock calculations. For the first time using nuclear mass formula, the
radius constant $r_0$=1.138 fm and binding energy per nucleon $a_v$ = -16.11
MeV, corresponding to the infinite nuclear matter, are consistently obtained
from the same source. An important offshoot of this study is the determination
of nuclear matter incompressibility $K_{\infty}$ to be 288$\pm$ 28 MeV using
the same source of nuclear masses as input.
