The old coyotes or Indians, fearing the earth might become depopulated in this way, concluded to stop it at once and ordered that when one of their people died the body must be burnt.

He assumed that Judah had been depopulated during the Babylonian exile, and that the only people left in Palestine were the heathen and the hated Samaritans.

To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants.