READING RIDDLES OF THE ROCKS § 125 
may confirm or refute this hint; for a blunt claw 
could not be used in tearing prey limb from 
limb, nor would a double-edged tooth, made 
for rending flesh, serve for champing grass. 
But few bones of the feet, and especially the 
fore feet, are present, these smaller parts of the 
skeleton having been washed away before the 
ponderous frame was buried in the sand, and 
the best that can be done is to follow the law 
of probabilities and put three toes on the hind 
foot and five on the fore, two of these last 
without claws. The single blunt round claw 
among our bones shows, as do the teeth, that 
Triceratops was herbivorous ; it also pointed a 
_ little downward, and this tells that in the living 
animal the sole of the foot was a thick, soft 
pad, somewhat as it is in the elephant and rhi- 
noceros, and that the toes were not entirely 
free from one another. There are less than a 
dozen vertebre and still fewer ribs, besides 
half a barrelful of pieces, from which to recon- 
struct a backbone twenty feet long. That the 
ribs are part from one side and part from an- 
other matters no more than it did in the case 
of the leg-bones; but the backbone presents a 
