The question as to the origin of the American Indians is a subject of deep interest to many advanced minds. Investigation for information bearing upon it has received a powerful impetus by discoveries of the ruins of vast cities and gigantic aqueducts, requiring the exercise of great architectural and engineering skill in their construction. These and other relics of past races, abounding in Central, the southern part of North, and in South America, give indisputable evidence of these regions having been inhabited, many centuries ago, by multitudinous enlightened populations that had attained a high state of civilization. The Book of Mormon, which gives an authentic history of those peoples, dissolves the mystery that heretofore enshrouded this department of research. It tells who those people were and from whence they sprang. It tells of a small colony, by commandment of God and led by His all-powerful hand, leaving Jerusalem, and after hazardous journeyings landing on the shores of America. It gives an account also of another party, consisting of Jews, going to the same continent subsequently, and amalgamating with the descendants of the first colonizers. A brief historical sketch is also given of a colony that left the Tower of Babel at the time of the confusion of languages. The existence of the ruins indicating the former presence of great populations, well advanced in arts and manufactures, was unknown to Joseph Smith when he translated the Book of Mormon, yet the closest scrutiny and comparison that have yet been given have failed to show a single discrepancy betwixt the record he was the instrument in bringing forth and publishing and even the most recent discoveries, to which we have not space, however, to refer. These ruins give unmistakable proof that remarkably advanced races have dwelt on the American Continent in the ages of the past. How reasonable it is to suppose that our Heavenly Father should have manifested Himself to them as He did on the Eastern Hemisphere. And if it be fair to infer that He did so exhibit His goodness and loving-tenderness, the subsequent inference that a record of these divine operations would be kept is equally so. How natural also to expect that He, as in the case of the Bible, would not suffer such a history to be lost, but rather that He would preserve it for the general benefit of erring humanity, that they might have additional testimony concerning a crucified and risen Redeemer. If the world would receive it, what a powerful combination the {212} two records--the Bible and Book of Mormon--would make. The one relates to the dealings of God with His people in the eastern part of the world, and the other in the west. They both harmonize, each testifying of the same everlasting plan of salvation, through the atonement of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.