Dalgarno, GEORGE

Dalgarno, GEORGE, an almost forgotten but very able author, was born at Aberdeen about 1626, studied at Marischal College, and afterwards kept a school in Oxford for thirty years, where he died August 28, 1687. He deserves to be remembered for two remarkable works—the Ars Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua Philosophica (1661), and Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor (1680). The former is a very ingenious attempt to represent and classify ideas by specific arbitrary characters irrespective of words. It contains the germs of Bishop Wilkins's subsequent speculations in his work, A Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). Leibnitz has repeatedly alluded to it in complimentary terms. The latter work has for its design 'to bring the way of teaching a deaf man to read and write as near as possible to that of teaching young ones to speak and understand their mother-tongue.'