The viscera, after removal, were thrown into the sea, as, according to Porphyry and Plutarch, it was the practice in Egypt at one time (=56=, pp. 57 and 58) to cast them into the Nile.
The body was painted with a mixture containing red-ochre, the scalp was painted black, and artificial eyes were inserted. These procedures were first adopted (in their entirety) in Egypt during the XXIst Dynasty, although the experiments leading up to the adoption of these methods began in the XIXth.
But most remarkable of all, the curiously inexplicable Egyptian procedure for removing the brain, which in Egypt was not attempted until the XVIIIth Dynasty—_i.e._, until its embalmers had had seventeen centuries experience of their remarkable craft (=78=)—was also followed by the savages of the Torres Straits (=25=; =27=)!
Surely it is inconceivable that such people could have originated the idea or devised the means for practising an operation so devoid of meaning and so technically difficult as this! The interest of their technique is that the Torres Straits operators followed the method originally employed in Egypt (in the case of the mummy of the Pharaoh Ahmes I. [=86=, p. 16]), which is one requiring considerable skill and dexterity, and not the simpler operation through the nostrils which was devised later (=78=).
The Darnley Islanders also made a circular incision through the skin of each finger and toe, and having scraped off the epidermis from the rest of the body, they carefully peeled off these thimbles of skin, and presented them to the deceased’s widow (=25=; =27=).
This practice is peculiarly interesting as an illustration of the adoption of an ancient Egyptian custom in complete ignorance of the purpose it was intended to serve. The ancient Egyptian embalmers (and, again, those of the XXIst Dynasty) made similar circular incisions around fingers and toes, and also scraped off the rest of the epidermis: but the aim of this strange procedure was to prevent the general epidermis, as it was shed (which occurred when the body was steeped for weeks in the preservative brine bath), from carrying the finger- and toe-nails with it (=78=). A thimble of skin was left on each finger and toe to keep the nail _in situ_; and to make it doubly secure, it was tied on with string (=78=) or fixed with a ring of gold or a silver glove (=84=).