AXIOMS and postulates long limited man's study of man. This hampering has been peculiarly marked in reference to America, the assumption being that it must have been peopled from the eastern hemisphere, and that its languages, religions, and customs must have been inherited from nations registered in Eurasian records. Whatever was found here was assumed to have come through descent or derivation. The conceptions of autogeny and of independent growth, by which men in the same plane of culture act and think alike, with only the modifications of environment, had not arisen to explain observed facts.

Many authors have contended that the North American Indians were descendants of the "ten lost tribes of Israel." Prominent among them was James Adair, whose work, highly useful with regard to the customs of the southeastern Indians, among whom he spent many years, was mainly devoted to proof of the proposition. The Rev. Ethan Smith is also conspicuous. Even the latest general treatise on the Indians, published last year, and bearing the comprehensive title, "The American Indian," favors the same theory.

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If any large number of them had remained in a body, and had migrated at a time long before the Columbian discovery, but later than the capture of Samaria in the seventh century B. C., their journey from Mesopotamia to North America would have required the assistance of miracles that have not been suggested except in the Book of Mormon.