The trouble an Indian takes to avoid the insects proves that despite his different skin color he is just as sensitive to mosquito bites as any white. Irritability is increased by wearing warm clothes, by applying alcoholic liquors, by scratching the wounds, and - and this I have observed myself - by taking too many baths. By bathing whenever we could Bonpland and I observed that a bath, though soothing for old bites, made us more sensitive to new ones. If you take a bath more than twice a day the skin becomes nervously excited in a way nobody in Europe could understand. It seems as if all one's sensitivity has become concentrated in the epidermic layers. Today the dangers that prevent Spaniards navigating up the Orinoco do not come from wild Indians or snakes or crocodiles or jaguars but, as they naively say, from 'el sudar y las moscas' (sweating and mosquitoes).