Heinrich Lambert was a still more adventurous speculator than his unknown English rival. His father was a poor tailor at Mühlhausen, then in Swiss territory, and he worked as his apprentice. But his irrepressible talents brought him into notice, and he died, in 1777, through the favour of the second Frederick, a Berlin Academician. His _Cosmological Letters_, published in 1761, were entirely original; they were composed in ignorance of what Wright and Kant had already written. In some respects he overtopped them both. He had splendid intuitions, and just touched the confines of greatness. And if his performances fell short of the very highest, it may have been rather through abridgment of opportunity than through lack of capacity. The Milky Way marked, to his apprehension, a sidereal ecliptic, and he coincided with Wright in regarding it as a disc of aggregated stars, but with breaches and gaps indicating a multiplicity of systems circulating, he thought, round a common centre. Nor did he doubt the existence of other Milky Ways--numberless, remote, unseen--grouped into a combination of a higher order; while beyond, and still beyond, stretched further hierarchies of systems on an ascending scale of magnitude and grandeur. Our knowledge of the structural facts of the universe can never be made exhaustive; in the middle of the eighteenth century, before Herschel had opened his sidereal campaign, it was barely elementary. Wright and Lambert were accordingly on a stint of material--they had to make bricks with very little straw. Yet they did their best with what was at hand. Both paid profound attention to the stellar heavens; they earnestly sought the true interpretation of the appearances presented by them, holding it possible, as we, despite accumulating difficulties, still do, to harmonize countless detached phenomena in one vast synthetic plan. It was this purpose of fidelity to Nature which gave value to their work, and made it a new thing in cosmological history. This alone lent it impulsive force, and caused the meditations of two lonely thinkers to become effective in stimulating fresh attempts, favoured by improved conditions, to comprehend what actually exists, and to infer thence, with rational confidence, its sources in the vague but undeniable past. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Zeller, _History of Greek Philosophy_, translated by S.F. Alleyne, vol. i., p. 86.] [Footnote 2: Quoted by R. Wolf, _Handbuch der Astronomie_, Bd. II., p. 593.] CHAPTER II THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS