Phalanx
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Phalanx. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
fa'lanks, a mode of military formation adopted by the infantry of Sparta, Thebes, and Macedon. The soldiers were armed chiefly with long spears. Each carried a shield to protect himself from the darts of the enemy. The phalanx reached its greatest efficiency under Philip of Macedon. The phalanx of Philip was an oblong mass of men standing in perfect order several ranks deep. They carried spears twenty-four feet long,-so long that the points of the fifth rank extended three feet beyond the front of the phalanx, while the front spears must have extended ten or twelve feet. In all, the points of five spears bristled before the front soldier. When the spears were held upright, the soldiers could wheel to the right or to the left, or about face, as readily as though they carried muskets, but when the spears were lowered for a charge, they riveted the entire phalanx into a body of men that could move in a forward direction only but whose onset was simply irresistible. Neither footmen, horse, nor rider could stand for a moment before a bristling wall of spears with a mighty mass of men behind them. By means of the phalanx Philip organized the most efficient military force in the ancient world. With its aid his son Alexander made himself master of Asia, and made Greece for a time the foremost power of the world. See Macedon
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Greek antiquities, the close order of battle in which the heavyof a Grecian army were armed troops usually drawn up. In anatomy, phalanges or phalanxes are the small bones of the fingers and toes, so called from their regular disposition. Normally each digit has three phalanxes. Called also internodes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The phalanx is still described much as Aiton's Encyclopedia described it in 1910, but two details have been revised. Modern scholars put the Macedonian sarissa at roughly 14 to 18 feet, not the 24 feet Aiton's claims, partly on the evidence of iron spearheads and butt-spikes excavated at Vergina in northern Greece; and the formation is no longer thought "simply irresistible" but rather the anvil that pinned an enemy while Alexander's Companion cavalry delivered the decisive blow, and it was famously vulnerable on broken ground and in the flank, as Roman legions showed at Cynoscephalae and Pydna. Collier's anatomical note of 1921 needs one correction that any textbook now makes: not every digit has three phalanges, since the thumb and the big toe have only two.
Written for this edition, 2026.