Because of this extreme aridity, agriculture in Nevada is dependent on irrigation.
In southern Bahia the industry has been nearly extinguished through increasing aridity and droughts, but in the state of Rio de Janeiro the planters are increasing their herds.
The habitats which they affect are the hot, dry regions of tropical America, the aridity of which they are enabled to withstand in consequence of the thickness of their skin and the paucity of evaporating pores or stomata with which they are furnished, - these conditions not permitting the moisture they contain to be carried off too rapidly; the thick fleshy stems and branches contain a store of water.
On the plains rain rarely falls during the heats of summer; and the showers though violent are generally of short duration, whilst the moisture is quickly evaporated owing to the aridity of the atmosphere.
The close of the period, too, saw the exclusion of the sea from the Pacific coast east of the Sierras, and the disappearance, so far as the United States is concerned, of the great north-western bay of the late Jurassic. Before the close of the period, the aridity which had obtained during the Permian, and at least a part of the Triassic, seems to have disappeared.
