Cumorah Revisited

to be divided into three classes: (1) Those who hold that both the people and their culture were exotic. (2) Those who hold that both were indigenous. And (3) those who hold that the people were of exotic origin, but who claim that their culture was purely an American product and not derived from any nation or nations whatever of the Old World. To the first class belong such writers as Ranking, Lang, Jones, Delafield and Adair, who advocated, respectively, the descent, either in whole or in part, of the Americans from the Mongolians, Polynesians, Phoenicians, Egyptians and Israelites; to the second, such writers as Morton, Nott and Gliddon, and others who deny the unity of the human species; and to the third, such of our later writers as Brinton, Powell and Marquis Nadaillac. The Book of Mormon teaches that both the people and the culture of ancient America came from the Old World. The Jaredites, coming from the Tower of Babel about twenty-two centuries B. C., landed upon the east coast of Central America, and for sixteen hundred years held sway over a territory which, at the wind-up of their career, extended from Honduras on the south to the Great Lakes on the north, and east and west from oceanto ocean; and the Nephites, immigrating from Jerusalem about 600 B. C., and landing upon the coast of Chili, by gradual movements spread northward, until, at the close cf their national existence in 385 A. D., they occupied both Americas. These peoples, it is clai...