Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, who was thoroughly familiar with both Egyptian and biblical antiquities, was impressed by the “striking resemblance” of many of the religious rites of the Jews to those of Egypt, “particularly the manner in which the sacrifices were performed;”[674] and he points out the Egyptian method of so slaying the sacrificial ox, that its blood should be fully discharged from the body; a point which was deemed of such importance in the Jewish ritual.[675] Of the illustration of this ceremony given by Wilkinson from an ancient Egyptian painting,[676] the Speaker’s Commentary says: “There is no reason to doubt that this picture accurately represents the mode pursued in the court of the [Jewish] Tabernacle.”[677] Almost as universal as the recognition of the life in the blood, has been the identification of the heart as the blood-centre and the blood-fountain, and so as the epitome of the life itself. Says Pierret,[678] the French Egyptologist, concerning the preeminence given to the heart, by the ancient Egyptians: “The heart was embalmed separately in a vase placed under the guardianship of the genius Duaoumautew [rather, Tuau-mut-ef, or, Reverencer of his Mother. ‘My heart was my mother.’ See page 99, _supra_] without doubt because this organ, indispensable to the resurrection, could not be replaced in the body of a man, until it had been weighed in the scale of the balance of the Osirian judgment (_Todtenbuch_, cxxv.); where representing the acts of the dead, it ought to make equilibrium with the statue of the goddess Truth [Maat]. (See the framed papyri in the funereal hall of the Museum of the Louvre.) Indeed the favorable sentence is thus formulated: ‘It is permitted that his heart be in its place.’ It is said to Setee I., in the temple of Abydos: ‘I bring thee thy heart to thy breast; I put it in its place.’ The heart, principle of existence and of regeneration, was symbolized by the scarabæus: it is for this reason that the texts relative to the heart were inscribed upon the funereal scarabæuses, which at a certain epoch were introduced into the body of the mummy itself, to replace the absent organ.”