Bowls
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Bowls. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a game resembling skittles and tenpins. It is played usually in a covered bowling alley. A level track several feet in width and perhaps sixty feet in length is constructed, usually of the best maple flooring laid on edge, and dressed to give as perfect a surface as possible. Ten pins, perhaps two feet in height, shaped like exercise clubs, are set up at one end of the alley. The players station themselves at the other end, and strive to knock down as many pins as possible by bowling a wooden ball from four to twelve inches in diameter along the track. Unless the ball be delivered with accuracy, it will run off into a gutter on either side. If delivered too swiftly, it will clip through the row of pins, knocking down only those in its immediate path; if delivered with insufficient force, it may fail to do much execution. The tenpins stand in the form of a triangle in four ranks of one, two, three, and four pins, respectively. The skillful player aims to strike the single pin of the first rank in such a way that its fall ultimately knocks down all the others. An attendant sets up the pins. He also lifts the balls and places them in an inclined trough along which they roll back to the players. A bowling establishment may contain several alleys arranged side by side with seats for spectators. In England this game is called skittles, the term of bowls being reserved for a game played on a plot of turf or bowling green, with balls like those used in croquet. One ball called a jack is placed at one end of the green. The players bowl their balls along the turf. When all have bowled, the player whose balls lie nearest the jack scores. Every player has two balls. The last to bowl has, of course, a great advantage, as he may aim to play his ball between the jack and the balls of his competitors, or he may strike the jack with his ball and drive it into a position more advantageous to himself. It is disconcerting when one's balls lie up nicely to the jack, to have a competitor bowl in and drive the jack to another part of the green. See Billiards ; Curling
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an ancient British game, still extremely popular. It is played on a smooth, level piece of greensward, gensur erally about 40 yards long, and rounded by a trench or ditch about six inches in depth. A small white ball called , the jack is placed at one end of the green range and the object of the players, who to themselves in sides at the other, is so roll their bowls that they may lie as near as possible to the jack. Each bowl is so biassed by being made slightly conical as to take a curvilinear direction; and, for this in making the proper allowance bias, and so regulating the cast of the of ball, consist the skill and attraction the the game. The side which owns greatest number of bowls next the jack, each bowl so placed constituting a point, carries off the victory.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 alley still needed a human "attendant" to set up the pins and roll the balls back; that job vanished after AMF put the first commercial automatic pinspotters into alleys in 1952, and by the 1960s pin boys were a memory. The equipment settled too: a ten-pin ball is now fixed at no more than 27 inches around (about 8.5 inches across) and 16 pounds, rather than Aiton's "four to twelve inches in diameter," and pins are scanned and scored electronically. Lawn bowls, which Collier's called "an ancient British game, still extremely popular" in 1921, is still played to much the same rules on much the same green, though the lignum vitae woods have given way to composite resin and the game now has a world championship and a regular place in the Commonwealth Games. Aiton's remark that the English call ten-pins "skittles" was loose even then: skittles is a distinct nine-pin game, and ten-pin bowling arrived in Britain as an American import in the 1960s.
Written for this edition, 2026.