The bones of the Celtic short-horn (_Bos longifrons_) were very abundant, and proved that a variety of ox, indistinguishable from the small dark mountain cattle of Wales and Scotland, was the chief food of the inhabitants. A variety of the goat with simple recurved horns, which is commonly met with in the Yorkshire tumuli explored by Canon Greenwell, and in the deposits round Roman villas in Great Britain, furnished the mutton; while the pork was supplied by a domestic breed of pigs with small canines; and since the bones of the last animal belong for the most part to young individuals, it is clear that the young porker was preferred to the older animal. The bill of fare was occasionally varied by the use of horse-flesh, which formed a common article of food in this country down to the ninth century. To this list must be added the venison of the roedeer and stag, but the remains of these two animals were singularly rare. Two spurs of the domestic fowl, and a few bones of wild duck and grouse, complete the list of animals which can with certainty be affirmed to have been eaten by the dwellers in the cave. The numerous unbroken bones, some very gigantic, of the badger, and those of the fox, wildcat, hare, and water-vole, commonly called water-rat, have probably been introduced subsequently, from those animals having used the cave as a place of shelter. There were also bones of the dog, which from their unbroken condition proved that the animal had not been used for food, as it certainly was used by the men who lived in the caves of Denbighshire in the Neolithic age. The whole group of remains implies that the dwellers in the Victoria Cave lived upon their flocks and herds, rather than by the chase. And since the domestic fowl was not known in Britain until about the time of the Roman invasion, the presence of its remains fixes the date of the occupation as not earlier than that time. On the other hand, since the small Celtic short-horn (_Bos longifrons_) was the only domestic ox in use known in Roman Britain, and since it disappeared from those portions of the country which were conquered by the English, along with its Celtic possessors, the date is fixed in the other direction as being not much later than the Northumbrian conquest of that portion of Yorkshire. I shall return to this part of the subject presently; here I will only remark, that the present distribution of the lineal descendants of the Celtic short-horn, the small, dark-coloured Scotch and Welsh cattle, corresponds with those regions on which the Celtic population fell back before the English. And its survival in Wales, and until comparatively recently in Cornwall, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, may be accounted for by the fact, that in those districts the Celtic populations of Roman Britain were not displaced by the English invaders.[50]