Of this presentation of the matter it is only necessary to say that it is a little singular that Mr. Fugate alone out of the three said to be in collusion in perpetrating the fraud should disclose it, and that he should wait from 1843 to 1879--a period of thirty-six years--before doing so, when he and those said to be associated with him had such an excellent opportunity to expose the vain pretensions of the Prophet-- if Fugate's tale be true? For while the statement in the text of the Prophet's Journal to the effect that the find was genuine, and that he had translated some of the characters and learned certain historical facts concerning the person with whose remains the plates were found, may not have been known at the time to the alleged conspirators to deceive him, still the editor of the _Times and Seasons_--John Taylor, the close personal friend of the Prophet--took the find seriously, and expressed at once explicit confidence in an editorial in the _Times and Seasons_, of May 1st, 1843, that the Prophet could give a translation of the plates. And this attitude the Church, continued to maintain; for in _The Prophet_, (a Mormon weekly periodical, published in New York) of the 15th of February, 1845, there was published a _fac-simile_ of the Kinderhook plates, together with the _Times and Seasons_ editorial and all the above matter of the text. How easy to have covered Joseph Smith and his followers with ridicule by proclaiming the hoax as soon as they accepted the Kinderhook plates as genuine! Why was it not done? The fact that Fugate's story was not told until thirty-six years after the event, and that he alone of all those who were connected with the event gives that version of it, is rather strong evidence that his story is the hoax, not the discovery of the plates, nor the engravings upon them. III. _The Tuccabatchey Plates._ In further evidence that the native Americans engraved records on metallic plates I quote the following from Adair's "History of the North American Indians." The passage is a footnote on the custom of the Indians burying a dead person's treasures with him: