Ihre, JOHAN

Ihre, JOHAN, an eminent Swedish scholar of Scottish extraction, was born at Lund in 1707, and educated at the university of Upsala, where he acquired a great reputation and carried off the highest honours. He subsequently travelled in France and England, was appointed on his return to Sweden under-librarian to the Academy of Sciences, and rose through a variety of offices to be professor of Belles-lettres and Political Economy (1748). He died in 1780. Ihre's principal work is his Glossarium Suiogothicum (2 vols. folio, 1769), a work of great talent and erudition, which, though a product of the pre-scientific age, may in some respects be regarded as the foundation of Swedish philology. It was issued at the cost of the state, which gave Ihre 10,000 dollars to execute it. Another work of lasting value is the Svenskt Dialect-Lexicon (1766).