Mormonism: its leaders and designs./ By John Hyde.

224 ANALYSIS OF THE BOOK OF MORMON.
serves to mislead the reader. It is not the plain honest nar rative of an honest man; it certainly is not the luminous
narrative of a God-inspired man. Telemachus' Mentor, build ing a ship on the island of Calypso, is rational, compared
with this statement of Nephi's ship-building. HIis voyage
across the island-dotted sea to America is a mystery of nav igation. This vagueness, inconsistency, evident effort at beingff
antique, is impossible in an honest narrator of facts, ridiculous
in a prophet; but perfectly natural in an ignorant impostor.
10. "We found upon the land of promise (Central America)
that there were beasts in the forest of every kind; the cow,
and the ox, and the ass, and the horse," Book of Mormon,
p. 44. This -is a palpable falsehood, and eminently displays
the impostor's hoof. "When horses were first brought to
Mexico, by Hernando Cortez, they were objects of the greatest astonishment to the aborigines, who thought they lived
on flesh as well as their riders, and brought flesh to feed them
with. They thouight that they devoured men in battle, and
that their neighing was a demand for prey" (Herera, Dec. ii.,
lib. vi.) "They invented a new weapon, with which to
catch and fight them" (Ib., Dec. v., lib. viii., quoted Robertson's History of America). This occurs in a country and
among a people, where the Book of Mormon makes horses quite
commron. The first horse the Utah Indians ever possessed,
they tied up till it died of starvation; they thought it need
not eat. South American horses have all sprung fiom those
introduced by the Spaniards. Cuba obtained her horses
from Spain; Mexico got hers from Cuba. West American
horses sprang from the Canadian, imported by the French.