Heinrich Frey

Heinrich Frey (15 June 1822 to 17 January 1890) was a German-born Swiss entomologist who studied Lepidoptera. Born in Frankfurt, he attended the gymnasium there until he was sixteen, where Senator Carl Heinrich Georg von Heyden introduced him to entomology, and he later studied at Frankfurt, Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen. Von Heyden showed him Philipp Christoph Zeller's classification of the Tineinae, whose orderly arrangement impressed him. Returning to Göttingen in 1847 he became a private tutor and then an extraordinary professor at the university, and in 1849 he accepted a professorial post at the University of Zurich, where he became an ordinary professor in the Medical Faculty in 1851, soon also a professor at the federal Polytechnikum, director of the microscopical anatomical institute, and rector of the high school from 1854 to 1856. His most important publications were Der Lepidopteren der Schweiz (1880) and Die Tineen und Pterophoren der Schweiz (1856), and he worked with Henry Tibbats Stainton, Philipp Christoph Zeller and John Douglas on The Natural History of the Tineina. He spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and died in Zürich at the age of 67.