IN THE NETHERLANDS 187 
However, Hooker's natural tact brought him safely through. 
The formalities of travel on the Continent in the forties 
were exasperating, his passport having to be signed by the 
Belgian and English Ambassadors in Paris and twice counter- 
signed by the Prefect of Police. Ten days were filled with 
fruitless errands, and to crown matters, diligence and train 
failed to make connection at Valenciennes. 
Brussels, where he stayed a second day to make acquaint- 
ance with Quetelet,^ at a meeting of the Brussels Academy, 
is summed up as ' a very interesting city, but not strong in 
Botanists,' though in the Garden ' the collection of Palms was 
excellent ; ... of other things they have no great store.' 
At Ghent, where he did not fail to see the Rubens pictures, 
he went over Van Houtte's nursery gardens, ' most extra- 
ordinary, both for the number of species of Botanical plants 
and of Camellias and other such.' After arranging for exchanges 
of plants, he was invited to dinner by Van Houtte, who was 
as hospitable as he was liberal. One point especially in his 
botanical interests struck his visitor : ' he takes the Magazine 
and is going to have the Journal and the Flora Antarctica.' 
Meantime the discomforts and difficulties of travel in such 
an Arctic winter are worth recording. March 4 saw delay 
of trains, the missing of diligence connexions, and consequent 
midnight journeys. ' I began to think,' he writes, * that I 
should never get to Holland at all.' March 5 was worse than 
ever ; 
the roads and rivers were so bad that several passengers were 
frightened and went round by some place South. Such a 
cruise I never had by land : the cold was intense, the thermo- 
meter at 7° with a keen wind. We crossed three rivers, one 
all frozen and covered with Hummocks and piles of ice, the 
second, the Maes, 1| miles broad, loaded with huge masses of 
Pack and Berg ice, rushing down to the sea ; the navigation 
1 Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874), a Belgian statistician 
and astronomer. Director of the Brussels Observatory 1828, and Professor of 
Astronomy 1836, and from 1834 Perpetual Secretary of the Belgian Royal 
Academy. Apart from mathematical treatises, his most important Avork was 
the book Sur Vhomme et le developpement de ses facultes (1835), and later he 
turned his mathematical mind to the study of anthropometry. 
