  We develop a novel way of finding total mass density profiles in Sersic
ellipticals, to about 3 times the major axis effective radius, using no other
information other than what is typically available for distant galaxies, namely
the observed surface brightness distribution and the central velocity
dispersion $\sigma_0$. The luminosity density profile of the observed galaxy is
extracted by deprojecting the measured brightness distribution and scaling it
by a fiduciary, step-function shaped, $raw$ mass-to-light ratio profile
($M/L$). The resulting raw, discontinuous, total, 3-D mass density profile is
then smoothed according to a proposed smoothing prescription. The parameters of
this raw $M/L$ are characterised by implementing the observables in a
model-based study.
  The complete characterisation of the formalism is provided as a function of
the measurements of the brightness distribution and $\sigma_0$. The formalism,
thus specified, is demonstrated to yield the mass density profiles of a suite
of test galaxies and is successfully applied to extract the gravitational mass
distribution in NGC 3379 and NGC 4499, out to about 3 effective radii.
