“…did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon? It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other. Not a few things merely, one or two, or a half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon origin… The material in Ethan Smith's book is of a character and quantity to make a ground plan for the Book of Mormon...” (p. 240)

“…the prevailing ideas respecting the American Indians throughout the regions named were favorable to the notion that they were of Hebrew origin... And with the existence of such a body of knowledge, or that which was accepted as ‘knowledge,’ and a person of vivid and constructive imaginative power in contact with it, there is little room for doubt that it might be possible for Joseph Smith to construct a theory of origin for his Book of Mormon in harmony with these prevailing notions; and more especially since this ‘common knowledge’ is set forth in almost handbook form in the little work of Ethan Smith... that one book, at least, with which he was most likely acquainted, could well have furnished structural outlines for the Book of Mormon; and that Joseph Smith was possessed of such creative imaginative powers as would make it quite within the lines of possibility that the Book of Mormon could have been produced in that way.” (pp.152-54)

“Could an investigator of the Book of Mormon be much blamed if he were to decide that Ethan Smith’s book with its suggestion as to the division of his Israelites into two peoples; with its suggestion of ‘tremendous wars between them’; and of the savages overcoming the civilized division led to the fashioning of chiefly these same things in the Book of Mormon?” (p. 192)