take special care to always present our readers with important new discoveries immediately or as fast as possible." In the same preface he put the main focus of the 'Mittheilungen' on physical and bio-geography, geology and other natural phenomena, and to a lesser degree on ethnography. Its greatest strength lay in the accompanying maps, for it was thought these would show best the results of geographic exploration. In an age hungry for adventure, but not yet totally scientifically literate, this was the best way to attract the largest possible group of interested readers. The maps not only supplemented several of the Perthes atlases, but were also used as a forum to elaborate on new themes, thus widening the thematic scope of cartography. He expresses his emphasis on maps anew when he writes in the Geographisches Jahrbuch: "In first instance the end result and final goal of all geographic investigations, explorations, and surveys is the depiction of the earth’s surface: the map. The map is the basis for geography. The map shows us what we know about our earth in the best, clearest and most exact way. The contemporary map should so depict the earth’s surface that one can not only measure the horizontal positions of and distances between all points and localities, but also clearly distinguish vertical variations, from sea level to the highest summits." Petermann was responsible for drawing most of the maps in the first few years of the journal. His strength was in the analysis and evaluation of all sources available. As such one can say that the indication 'Originalkarte' (original map) in many titles was well earned, for few slavishly copied what explorers or other experts had sketched. German geographers, like Hermann Wagner (1840–1929), claimed that in other geographical journals explorer's maps were just copied instead of having them evaluated by cartographers first. Maps based on recent exploration reports were always, when possible, complemented with route maps from previous expeditions. He did not like to infer or extrapolate from the sources, for that might give inaccurate measurements, so many of his maps show large blank spaces. How right he was in this respect was demonstrated in 1911 when Julien Thoulet drafted bathymetric maps for the territory of France. In these four maps he draws hypothetical isobaths, which are based on respectively 15, 31, 154, and 308 altitude measurements per for France and the adjacent territories. (A