"Unlike anything heretofore discovered on this continent, or indeed in the whole world, we here have presented to our views, as we now firmly believe, the unbroken history of a people that existed not only for a great length of time since the building of the Egyptian pyramids, but contemporary with them, and, what is more wonderful still, far back and yet still farther into the mazes of antiquity." In Harper's _Weekly_ for October, 1879, (published in New York), is an article by Henry C. Walsh, entitled "Copan: a City of the Dead." In it he says: "During the progress of the excavations made by the last Peabody expedition Mr. Gordon discovered a stone pavement at the southern end of the great plaza. By digging downwards he came to the walls and chambers of a building more ancient than and of a different character from those now above the surface. Here were found tablets inscribed with characters varying materially from those on the known monuments. In the adjoining structures above ground were found blocks of stone, used in the construction, which had evidently been cut from older sculptures. _All this points to successive periods of occupation_, of which there are other evidences." ORIGIN BEFORE THE CHRISTIAN ERA. The Book of Mormon states that about 600 years before the birth of Christ a small colony of the Hebrew race left Jerusalem and was led by the Lord to the shores of America. This colony was composed, on the commencement of its journey, of two heads of families, Lehi and Ishmael, their wives and children, and a man named Zoram. They observed the law of Moses, and took with them a record of their forefathers, containing the five books of Moses, giving an account of the creation of the world, of Adam and Eve, and also of the Jews from the beginning down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah. This record was engraved on plates of brass. The youngest of the four sons of Lehi, Nephi by name, was the leading spirit in the company. He also commenced a record of their doing, which he engraved {271} upon plates of metal in the language of the Egyptians, and in what their descendants called reformed Egyptian characters. (See I Nephi, also Mosiah 1: 4, and Mormon 9: 32-33). That the origin of the American Indians dates back to some period before the Christian era is testified to by a number of archaeologists. Professor Waterman, of Boston, Massachusetts, in a lecture delivered in the Fine Arts Academy, Bristol, in 1849, speaking of the time the forefathers of the Indians went to America, says: