678 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
county, New York. And in this environment grew up the " author and proprietor " of the Book of Mormon.
A French writer, not long ago, having occasion to criticize the English people from the French point of view, exclaimed : 4< What a wonderful people those English are ! They have in- vented fifty religions and not one gravy ! " Have the descendants of the English, in crossing the seas, changed the traditions of the race ? Is not the invention of " religions " still going on, with as much prospect of continuance in Greater Britain as in Great Britain itself?
The Book of Mormon was printed in 1830. Joseph Smith Jr was at the time twenty-four years of age. He was, according to some authorities, unable to read or write ; by others it is asserted that while able to read and write to some extent he did so with difficulty. By no authority is it contended that he was in any respect more than very poorly educated. And yet, in this pub- lication, we have a work of the greatest anthropological, ethno- logical, and archeological interest, struck off in one complete, full, perfect act, at the hands of an uneducated, uncultivated, country boor of equivocal reputation and low origin. It is not, like the Christian Bible, the product of fifteen centuries of growth, a fabric woven together out of the shredded history of many races, nations, and tongues, and at the hands of a hundred writers strung along the centuries over a period of time almost inconceivable in duration. On the contrary, this Book of Mor- mon purports to be a record delivered to Joseph Smith Jr when he was in a vision on September 21, 1823, at the age of eighteen years, by an angel of God, named " Moroni," said record being, in the words of the author —
a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang. . . . He also said that there were two stones in silver bows (and these stones fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim,) deposited with the plates, and the
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