Cricket began when first a man-monkey instead of catching a cocoanut thrown him playfully by a fellow-anthropoid hit it away from him with a stick which he chanced to be holding in his hand. But the date of this occurrence is not easy to ascertain and therefore it is impossible to fix the date of the invention of cricket. For cricket has passed through so many stages of evolution before arriving at the phase in which we find it to-day that it is difficult to say when the name as we understand its meaning first became rightly applicable to it. The first use of the name "cricket" for any game is indeed a matter entirely of conjecture. It is not known precisely by Skeat nor  Strutt nor Mr. Andrew Lang. But whether the name was applied by reason of the cricket or crooked stick which was the early form of the bat or whether from the cross stick used as a primitive bail or from the cricket or stool at which the bowler aimed the ball really does not very much matter for all these etymological vanities belong rather to the mythological age of cricket than the historical.