Other considerations that may affect the evidences of American antiquities to the Book of Mormon arise out of the conditions which have obtained in the western world since the close of the Nephite period. What I have called the Nephite period closes with the commencement of the fifth century A. D., and as it was towards the close of the fifteenth century before America was discovered by the Spaniards and made known to Europeans, there is a thousand years during which time many things may have happened to affect conditions in America by the time it was discovered by Columbus; and which, at the time of that discovery, and now, influence, not to say confuse, our knowledge of American antiquities, by indiscriminately mingling the modern with the ancient, confounding local movements with more ancient and general migrations, and mixing merely tribal events with the national affairs of more ancient times, until things are rendered in some respects well nigh unintelligible. When the Nephites were overthrown in those last great battles about Cumorah, it appears that the victorious Lamanites were possessed with the most frenzied determination to destroy the last vestige of civilization, government, and religion; but when they had destroyed their enemies, the Nephites, they continued the fighting among themselves, until the whole face of the land was one continual scene of intestine wars. [7] How long such conditions continued no one knows, since the Book of Mormon closes with its sad story of the overthrow of the Nephites, and there is nothing beyond this point--the early part of the fifth century A. D.--by which we can be guided. It is probable, however, that even anarchy at last spent its force; something like tribal relations may have been brought into existence to take the place of the more elaborate and complex forms of government which had been overthrown, and from these may have arisen confederacies of tribes as interest or fortune, good or ill, may have dictated, until at last something like semi-civilization begun to arise out of the chaos which followed the destruction of the Nephites. The maddened Lamanites might succeed in destroying every vestige of government, religion and that order of society which had prevailed in former times, but the memory of those things, and the advantages of them, could not be obliterated; and the memory of them would be an incentive to strong minds to re-establish a settled order of things.