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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.