in Grecian antiquity, a square battalion of soldiers, with their shields joined and pikes crossing each other; so that it was next to impossible to break it.

The Macedonian phalanx is supposed by some to have had the advantage, in valour and strength, over the Roman legion. Its number was 8000 men. But the word phalanx is used for a party of 28, and several other numbers; and even sometimes for the whole body of foot. See Legion.

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 lithofracture. In the great variety of specimens we find Coll. of Foss. 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 lithofracture, or general conglomeries 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 tinged with the matter of the stone in which it lies. The single columns, which form each phalanx, are usually round or cylindric, though sometimes flatted 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 Phalaris. They are from five or six to fifteen 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 conglomeries 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.