PHALANX is applied, by anatomists, to the three rows of small bones which form the fingers. In natural history it is a term which Dr Woodward and some other writers of fossils have used to express an arrangement of the columns of that sort of fossil coralloide body found frequently in Wales, and called Woodward's lithostrotion. In the great variety of specimens we find of this, some have the whole phalanx of columns cracked through, and others only a few of the external ones; but these cracks never remain empty, but are found filled up with a white spar, as the smaller cracks of stone usually are. This is not wonderful, as there is much spar in the composition of this fossil; and it is easily washed out of the general mass to fill up these cracks, and is then always found pure, and therefore of its natural colour, white.
The lithostrotion, or general congeries of these phalanges of columns, is commonly found immersed in a grey stone, and found on the tops of the rocky cliffs about Milford in Wales. It is usually erect, though somewhat inclining in some specimens, but never lies horizontal. It seems to have been all white at first, but to have been since gradually tinctured with the matter of the stone in which it lies. The single columns, which form each phalanx, are usually round or cylindrical, though sometimes flattened and bent; some of them are also naturally of an angular figure; these, however, are not regular in the number of their angles, some consisting of three sides, some of five, and some
of seven; some are hexangular also, but these are scarce. They are from five or six to sixteen inches in length; and the largest are near half an inch over, the least about a quarter of an inch; the greater number are very equal to one another in size; but the sides of the columns being unequal, the same column measures of a different thickness when measured different ways; the phalanges or congeries of these are sometimes of a foot or more in diameter.
The columns are often burst, as if they had been affected by external injuries; and it is evident that they were not formed before several other of the extraneous fossils; for there are found sometimes shells of sea-fishes, and entrochi immersed and bedded in the bodies of the columns. It appears plainly from hence, that when these bodies were washed out of the sea, and tossed about in the waters which then covered the tops of these cliffs, this elegant fossil, together with the stony bed in which it is contained, were so soft, that those other bodies found entrance into their very substance, and they were formed as it were upon them. This fossil takes an elegant polish, and makes in that state a very beautiful appearance, being of the hardness of the common white marble, and carrying the elegant structure visible in the smallest lineaments.