The translation of the ancient hieroglyphics had been accomplished by a method unknown to modern scholarship. Accompanying the plates of gold which contained the sacred writing was a mechanism called the urim and thummin, a sort of seer stone, which made the Egyptian letters intelligible to the unlettered young man. (Andrew Love Neff, History of Utah: 1847 to 1869, ed. Leland Hargrave Creer [Salt Lake City: The Deseret News Press, 1948], 5)