DALGARNO, George, an almost forgotten but highly meritorious and original writer, was born in Old Aberdeen about the year 1626. He appears to have studied at Marischal College, New Aberdeen, but for what length of time, or with what objects, is wholly unknown. In 1657 he went to Oxford, where, according to Anthony Wood, “he taught a private grammar school with good success for about thirty years.” (^Athen. Oxon. vol. ii. p. 506-7.) He died of a fever on the 28th August 1687, and was buried, says the same author, “in the north body of the Church of St Mary Magdalen.” Such is the scanty biography which has been preserved of a man who lived in friendship with the most eminent philosophers of his day, and who, besides other original speculations, had the singular merit of anticipating, a hundred and fifty years ago, some of the most profound conclusions of the present age respecting the education of the deaf and dumb. His work upon this subject is entitled Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Mans Tutor, and was printed in a very small volume at Oxford in 1680. He states the design of it to be, to bring the way of teaching a deaf man to read and write, as nearly as possible to that of teaching young ones to speak and understand their mother tongue. “In prosecution of this general idea,” says an eminent philosopher of our own time, who on more than one occasion did his endeavour to rescue the name of Dalgarno from oblivion, “he has treated in one short chapter, of a Deaf Mans Dictionary ; and, in another, of a Grammar for Deaf Persons ; both of them containing a variety of precious hints, from which useful practical lights might be derived by all who have any concern in the tuition of children during the first stage of their education.” (Mr Dugald Stewart’s Account of a Boy born Blind and Deaf. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinb. vol. vii.) Twenty years before the publication of his Didascalocophus, Dalgarno had given to the world a very ingenious piece entitled Ars Signorum, from which, says Mr Stewart, it appears indisputably'' that he was the precursor of Bishop Wilkins in his speculations concerning “a real character and a philosophical language.” Anthony Wood tells us expressly, indeed, that Dalgarno communicated this piece to Wilkins before it was published, and that it was from it that the latter took the hint of his celebrated work. It is highly discreditable to Wilkins that he takes no notice whatever of the name of Dalgarno; and Dr Wallis must share the same censure. “That Dalgarno’s suggestions with respect to the education of the dumb were not altogether useless to Dr Wallis, will be readily admitted by those,” says Mr Stewart, “who take the trouble to compare his Letter to Mr Beverly, published eighteen years after- Dalgarno’s treatise, with his Tractatus de Loquela, published in 1653. In this Letter some valuable remarks are to be found on the method of leading the dumb to the signification of words, and yet the name of Dalgarno is not once mentioned to his correspondent.” That notice which the English professors, who borrowed from them, ungenerously withheld from the writings of the Scottish schoolmaster, was liberally bestowed upon them by a far greater man of another country, namely, Leibnitz, who has, on various occasions, alluded to the Ars Signorum in commendatory terms.