| Show when the book of mormon announced to the world more than fifty years ago that this continent was inhabited once by a civilized people the assertion waa made lighter no evidences were yet discovered that would demonstrate to the skeptic ahe truth of anch an assertion it was not long however until traces of a once high stae of civilization were discovered giving conclusive evidence that the announcement no of the book of mormon was fully consistent recently a puzzle to antiquarians has been discovered at a small village called mendon near quincy A young man was digging a post hole when ho came upon a copper plate embedded imbedded im in the clay the family have owned the place for more than forty years and when they located the gronna was a dense forest the copper plate exhumed proved to be a musical instrument or rather the fragments of an instrument the wood of it having decayed but the copper which seems to have constituted the sounding board and keys still remaining in good condition one of the strange features of the instrument ment is that there is not a parti cal of iron about it it was made entil ely of copper rivets of copper abroad sheet of copper copper pegs and copper keys everything ever thing of copper the instrument seemed to have been a combination of a harp and of a violin the shape is three cornered like a harp but th strings were stretched across a bridge and fastened to the key board at either end as in a violin making a very unusual combination there is no instrument like it in modern use and nothing among the ancients that at all resembles it have been constructed for a diatonic scale foi there are ten pegs showing thai there ten strings though the the strings for the baoe were ed from the ones there are also seven bars or marks where the bars were for the fingering of the shorter strings no bars for the long strings the opening in the copper sounding board are much larger longer and wider than are usual in instruments of this kind guitars violin mandolin they show however that there must have been a hollow box the copper sheet serving as a sounding board above the box the mysterious part of the whole relic is that there are ten chic characters cut into the copper sounding board cloae by the pcs these are unlike any musical signs keown in modern times they aio unlike any known alphabet they resemble the acs ics were found on the davenport tablet over which the savanis savants have puzzled themselves so thoroughly they are also like the on the grave creek tablet they are not exact counterparts but resemble the letters on the davenport tablet have been compared to hittite phoenician or samaritan and other eastern alphabetic letters Thoy donot exactly correspond the american antiquarian is puzzled not a little over these letters it says the question is was an alphabet introduced into this county before the white man arrived the relics are not indian fabrication the indians had no such musical instrument they did not make copper plates or sheets this copper sheet was apparently rolled in a mill it may have been the sheathing of a vessel or it may have been purchased for the manufacture of the instrument the workmanship is such as a white man would do if he had tools which were rude the angles are all square or nearly so the holes contain rivets the pegs aie hammered with square heads the pieces were put together apparently to make a close fit they are unlike any boond builders work still there is a strange mingling of ancient and modern handiwork in the instrument the at least sebio ancient though the material is apparently modern still the fact that every part of it is copper not a particle of iron about it and oo 00 iron or wood found adar it mould show that it was different from modern work there is a mystery about the whole tiling the are especially ous the chicago inter ocean solves the question by suggesting that some mormon hid the relic to thereby prove the authenticity of the book of mormon nauvoo formerly a mormon city is only about twenty five miles from the spot where the relic was die covered this theory would show the antiquarians qu arians up to be even greater fools than the scientists of mr time furthermore if true in this instance that the cormons mormons have been cine deception we are equally justified in saying they the wonderful canals and castles of arizona and mexico and placed in these ruins the equally puzzling instruments and relics that have there been |
