“With the Guanches, the embalmers were abject beings; men and women filled this employment respectively, for their sexes; they were well paid, but their touch was considered contamination; and all who were occupied in preparing the xaxos lived retired, solitary, and out of sight. It is, then, out of place, that Sprats has advanced the idea, that embalming was confined to a tribe of priests, who made a sacred mystery of it, and that the secret died with the priests. There were several kinds of embalming, and several different employments for those who had charge of it. When they had need of the services of the embalmers, they carried the body to them to be preserved, and immediately retired. If the body belonged to persons capable of bearing the expenses, they extended it at first on a stone table; an operator then made an opening in the lower part of the belly with a sharpened flint, wrought into the form of a knife and called _tabona_; the intestines were withdrawn, which other operators afterwards washed and cleaned; they also washed the rest of the body, and particularly the delicate parts, as the eyes, interior of the mouth, the ears, and the nails, with fresh water saturated with salt. They filled the large cavities with aromatic plants; they then exposed the body to the hottest sun, or placed it in stoves, if the sun was not hot enough. During the exposition, they frequently endued the body with an ointment, composed of goats’ grease, powder of odoriferous plants, pine bark, resin, tar, ponce stone, and other absorbing materials. Feuille thinks that these unctions were also made with a composition of butter, and desiccative and balsamic substances, among which are mentioned the resin of larch, and the leaves of pomegranate, which never possessed the property of preserving bodies. “On the fifteenth day the embalming should be completely terminated; the mummy should be dry and light; the relatives send for it and establish the most magnificent obsequies in their power. They sew up the body in several folds of the skin, which they had prepared when living, and they bind it with straps, retained by running knots. The kings and the grandees were besides, placed in a case or coffin of a single piece, and hollowed out of the trunk of the juniper tree, the wood of which was held as incorruptible. They then finally, carried the xaxos, thus sown and encased, to inaccessible grottoes consecrated to this purpose. “Another less expensive mode of preserving the dead, consisted in drying them in the sun, after having introduced into the belly a corrosive liquor: this liquor eats into the interior parts, where the sun does not act sufficiently to prevent their corruption. Like the other xaxos, the relatives sowed them in skins and carried them to the grottoes.