Ophiologists had scientific facts to verify: this opportunity must not be neglected for ascertaining whether so cold a nature, and in midwinter, could produce sufficient warmth by lying there day after day upon her bushel of eggs. So thermometers were ever and anon thrust between her coils, or held close to her; first here, then there, after the example of M. Dumeril in Paris. Other disturbances in the way of cleaning out the cage and supplying her companion in captivity with food and water were angrily resented by the poor patient, who had no chance of the tranquillity that she would have sought for herself in her native tropics. Besides which, the chances against hatching were far greater in her case than in the Paris and Amsterdam pythons. The former saved only eight out of her fifteen, and here we had, in round numbers, one hundred, more than she could successfully cover at one time. Moreover, a most untoward accident happened one night by the tank overflowing among her eggs, necessitating a complete disturbance of them. What wonder, then, that she was irritable and even savage during the whole time of her incubation! One egg, examined fifteen days after it was laid, contained a living embryo, so there were hopes of some at least maturing. For more than seven weeks she remained patiently brooding, when all hope of hatching any of the eggs had vanished, and it became necessary to take them from her. This was done by degrees, and the task was no easy one. The keeper watched his opportunity to raise the sliding door at the back of the cage, make a snatch at those nearest him, and shut down the slide with celerity, or the exasperated mother would have seized him. He nearly got his arm broken more than once by the despatch he was compelled to use. Sometimes, so quick was she, that in thrusting down the slide she was nearly jammed by it. Holland protected himself by holding up a corner of the rug so as to hide himself when he had occasion to open the slide door; yet one day she ‘jumped’ at him, seizing the rug, and with a toss of her head jerking it back with such violence that a shower of the gravel came hailing upon the glass in front of the cage, to the consternation and alarm of the spectators gathered there, and who at the moment imagined the glass was broken, and that the infuriated reptile would be among them. But they were behind her; it was only towards the keeper that her fury was directed: he had taken away the last of her eggs. When, then, he shut down the slide, she kept her angry eyes fixed upon it for a long while. Presently she sought in her empty nest, upon which, so long as any eggs had remained to her, she had re-settled herself after each irruption. At last she took to her bath, in which she remained for a long while.