Henry Freke (1813-1888) was an Irish

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

and early evolutionary writer.

Biography

Freke took a B. A. at

Trinity The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God th ...

in 1840, his M. B. in 1845 and his M.D. in 1855. He worked as a physician in various hospitals in

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

and worked at the first Irish lunatic asylum founded by

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dubl ...

.Blackith, Robert E. (1980). ''Henry Freke: An Early Dublin Evolutionist''. '' Irish Naturalists' Journal''. Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 104-106 He is credited for developing the concept of

negative entropy In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality. The concept and phrase "negative entropy" was introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book '' What is Life?'' Later, Léon Bril ...

Evolution

His early writings in the '' Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science'' experimented with evolutionary ideas such as all organisms descending from a single germ. Freke proposed an evolutionary theory in 1851 and more fully in a book for 1861. Freke argued to have published on evolution before

Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended ...

. In 1851 he wrote a pamphlet that claimed animals and plants had evolved from a single filament. He sent a copy of the pamphlet to Darwin who described the writing style as "ill-written" and "beyond my scope". However, in the ''Historical Sketch'' which first appeared in the 3rd Edition of Darwin's ''

On the Origin of Species ''On the Origin of Species'' (or, more completely, ''On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life''),The book's full original title was ''On the Origin of Species by Me ...

'' (1861), Freke is listed as an early evolution proponent. On page 83 of his ''On the Origin of Species by Means of Organic Affinity'' (1861), Freke developed a theory of

pangenesis Pangenesis was Charles Darwin's hypothetical mechanism for heredity, in which he proposed that each part of the body continually emitted its own type of small organic particles called gemmules that aggregated in the gonads, contributing herita ...

, in which he proposed that all life was developed from microscopic organic agents which he named ''granules'', which existed as 'distinct species of organizing matter' and would develop into different biological structures.

Publications

* ''Reflections on Organization, or Suggestions for the Construction of an Organic Atomic Theory'' (1848)
''On the Origin of Species by Means of Organic Affinity''
(1861) * ''An Appeal to Physiologists and the Press'' (1862)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Freke, Henry 1813 births 1888 deaths 19th-century Irish medical doctors Proto-evolutionary biologists