See G. H. Mellin, _Skildringar af den Skandinaviska Nordens Folklif og Natur_, vol. iii. (1865); and Frederika Bremer, _I Dalarne_ (1845), of which there is an English translation by William and Mary Howitt (1852). For the dialect, see a paper by A. Noreen, in _De Svenska Landsmålen_, vol. iv. (1881).
DALGAIRNS, JOHN DOBREE (1818-1876), English Roman Catholic priest, was born in Guernsey on the 21st of October 1818. About the age of seventeen he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and soon after taking his degree he contributed a letter to Louis Veuillot's ultramontane organ _L'Univers_, on "Anglican Church Parties," which gave him considerable repute. Together with Mark Pattison and others, he translated the _Catena aurea_ of St Thomas Aquinas, a commentary on the Gospels, taken from the works of the Fathers. He was a contributor to Newman's _Lives of the English Saints_, for which he wrote the beautiful studies on the Cistercian Saints. _The Life of St Stephen Harding_ has been translated into several languages. Dalgairns became a Roman Catholic in 1845, and was ordained priest in the following year. He joined his friend John Henry Newman in Rome, and, together with him, entered the Congregation of the Oratory. On his return to England in 1848, he was attached to the London Oratory, where he laboured successfully as a priest, with the exception of three years spent in Birmingham. Dalgairns was a prominent member of the well-known "Metaphysical Society." He died at Burgess Hill, near Brighton, on the 6th of April 1876. During the Catholic period of his life, Dalgairns wrote _The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with an Introduction on the History of Jansenism_ (London 1853); _The German Mystics of the Fourteenth Century_ (London, 1858); _The Holy Communion, its Philosophy, Theology and Practice_ (Dublin, 1861).
A list of his contributions on religious and philosophical subjects, to the reviews and periodicals, is given in J. Gillow's _Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics_, vol. ii.
DALGARNO, GEORGE (c. 1626-1687), English writer, was born at Old Aberdeen about 1626. He appears to have studied at Marischal College; but he finally settled in Oxford, where, according to Wood, "he taught a private grammar-school with good success for about thirty years," and where he died on the 28th of August 1687. He was master of Elizabeth school, Guernsey, for some ten years, but resigned in 1672. In his work entitled _Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor_ (Oxford, 1680), he explained, for the first time, the hand alphabet for the deaf and dumb, though he does not claim to have invented this method of communication. Twenty years before the publication of his _Didascalocophus_, Dalgarno had given to the world a very ingenious piece entitled _Ars Signorum_ (1661), dividing ideas into seventeen classes, to be represented by the letters of the Latin alphabet with the addition of two Greek characters. Among the Sloane manuscripts are several tracts by Dalgarno, further elucidating his system of universal shorthand. Leibnitz on various occasions alluded to the _Ars signorum_ in commendatory terms.