Herodotus (ii. 86) gives an account of three of the methods of embalming followed by the Egyptians. The most expensive of these, which cost a talent of silver (£243: 15s.), was as follows. The brains were in part removed through the nostrils by means of a bent iron implement, and in part by the injection of drugs. The intestines having been drawn out through an incision in the left side, the abdomen was cleansed with palm-wine, and filled with myrrh, cassia and other materials, and the opening was sewed up. This done, the body was steeped seventy days in a solution of litron or natron.[1] Diodorus (i. 91) relates that the cutter ([Greek: paraschistês]) appointed to make the incision in the flank for the removal of the intestines, as soon as he had performed his office, was pursued with stones and curses by those about him, it being held by the Egyptians a detestable thing to commit any violence or inflict a wound on the body. After the steeping, the body was washed, and handed over to the swathers, a peculiar class of the lowest order of priests, called by Plutarch _cholchytae_, by whom it was bandaged in gummed cloth; it was then ready for the coffin. Mummies thus prepared were considered to represent Osiris. In another method of embalming, costing twenty-two minae (about £90), the abdomen was injected with "cedar-tree pitch" ([Greek: kedria]), which, as it would seem from Pliny (_Nat. Hist._ xvi. 21), was the liquid distillate of the pitch-pine. This is stated by Herodotus to have had a corrosive and solvent action on the viscera. After injection the body was steeped a certain number of days in natron; the contents of the abdomen were allowed to escape; and the process was then complete. The preparation of the bodies of the poorest consisted simply in placing them in natron for seventy days, after a previous rinsing of the abdomen with "syrmaea." The material principally used in the costlier modes of embalming appears to have been asphalt; wax was more rarely employed. In some cases embalming seems to have been effected by immersing the body in a bath of molten bitumen. Tanning also was resorted to. Occasionally the viscera, after treatment, were in part or wholly replaced in the body, together with wax figures of the four genii of Amenti. More commonly they were embalmed in a mixture of sand and asphalt, and buried in vases, or _canopi_, placed near the mummy, the abdomen being filled with chips and sawdust of cedar and a small quantity of natron. In one jar were placed the stomach and large intestine; in another, the small intestines; in a third, the lungs and heart; in a fourth, the gall-bladder and liver. Porphyry (_De abstinentia_, iv. 10) mentions a custom of enclosing the intestines in a box and consigning them to the Nile, after a prayer uttered by one of the embalmers, but his statement is regarded by Sir J.G. Wilkinson as unworthy of belief. The body of Nero's wife Poppaea, contrary to the