history. Harris told him he had not seen the plates, but that he intended to sell his farm and give the proceeds to enable Smith to publish a translation of them. This statement, with what follows, shows that Smith's original intention, quoad the alleged plates, was to use them as a means for swindling Harris. The Mormons have published accounts of Professor Anthon's judgment on the paper submitted to him, which he himself states to be "perfectly false." The Mormon version of the interview represents Dr. Anthon "as having been unable to decipher the characters correctly, but as having presumed that, if the original records could be brought, he could assist in translating them." On this statement being made, Dr. Anthon described the document submitted to him as having been a sort of pot-pourri of ancient marks and alphabets. "It had evidently been prepared by some person who had before him a book containing various alphabets; Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters, inverted or placed sideways, were arranged in perpendicular columns, and the whole ended in a rude delineation of a circle, divided into various compartments, decked with numerous strange marks, and evidently copied after the Mexican Calendar given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source whence it was derived." This account disposes of the statement that the characters were Egyptian, while the very jumble of the signs of different nations, languages, and ages, proves that the impostor was deficient both in tact and knowledge. The scheme seems to have been, at all events, in petto when Smith communicated with Harris; but a satisfactory clue to the fabrication is lost in our ignorance of the time and circumstances under which Smith and Rigdon came together. It must have been subsequent to that event that the "translation," by means of the magic Urim and Thummim, was begun. This work Smith is represented as having labored at steadily, assisted by Oliver Cowdrey, until a volume was produced containing as much matter as the Old Testament, written in the Biblical style, and containing, as Smith said the Angel had informed him, a history of the lost tribes in their pilgrimage to and settlement in America, with copious doctrinal and prophetic commentaries and revelations.

The devotion of Harris to the impostor secured a fund sufficient for defraying the cost of printing the pretended revelation, and the sect began slowly to increase. The doctrines of Smith were not at first very clearly defined; it is probable that neither he nor Rigdon had determined what should be their precise character; but like their early contemporary the prophet Matthias (the interesting history of whose career was published in New-York several years ago by the late Colonel Stone), they had no hesitation in deciding on one cardinal point, that the revelations made to Smith at any time should be received with unquestioning and implicit faith, and the earliest of these revelations contemplated a liberal provision for all the prophet's personal necessities. Thus, in February, 1831, it was revealed to the disciples that they should immediately build the prophet a house; on another occasion it was enjoined that, if they had any regard for their own souls, the sooner they provided him with food and raiment, and every thing he needed, the better it would be for them; and in a third revelation, Joseph was informed that "he was not to labor for his living." All these "revelations" were received, and though the impostor seemed to intelligent men little better than a buffoon, his followers soon learned to regard him as almost deserving of adoration, and he began to revel in whatever luxury and profligacy was most agreeable to his vulgar taste and ambition. As in the case of the scarcely more respectable pretender, Andrew Jackson Davis, it was asserted that his original want of cultivation precluded the notion of his having by the exercise of any natural or acquired faculties produced his "revelations." Everywhere his followers said, "The prophet is not learned in a human sense: how could he have become acquainted with all the antiquarian learning here displayed, if it were not supernaturally communicated to him?" But to this question there was soon an answer equally explicit and satisfactory. The real author of the Book of Mormon was a Rev. Solomon Spaulding, who wrote it as a romance. Its entire history and the means by which it came into the possession of Smith are described, in the following statement, by Mr. Spaulding's widow:—

CROSSING THE MISSOURI.