a means for friends at home to follow their moves and to judge the value of their labour. This by creating a cartographic representation of the least known central regions of Africa utilizing all material at hand as completely as possible, to display the range of our contemporary knowledge as well as the way this knowledge is acquired and the degree of its reliability." Arctic explorations Petermann spent a lot of time on the active promotion of his exploratory missions, especially the polar regions. For this he wrote more articles than for any of his other ventures. Up to 1871 he published seventeen maps of the Arctic and Antarctic in the regular issues and eight in the 'supplement' issues. He began publishing notices on the geography and exploration of the polar regions in PGM 38, 1871 (Geographie und Erforschung der Polar-Regionen started in 1865 and nos. 51–135 appeared in PGM volumes 16, 1871 to 23, 1878), and from that time onwards 195 maps covered the polar regions, but none appeared in the supplements of that period. He actually started to push his interest in this subject in the 1865 issue of PGM and with the publication of supplement 16 (Ergänzungsband IV) in 1865. In the PGM-issue he recites the correspondence he has with the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) concerning the proposal of capt. Sherard Osborn (1822–1875) to send another English expedition to the North pole starting from Baffin Bay. In several articles he tries to persuade the RGS to support his plan to start the expedition from Spitsbergen and use steamships instead of sledges for transport. In one article he stresses his love for Arctic expeditions by reminiscing: "Who, like us, e.g. has attended the accounts of one capt. Inglefield (Edward Augustus Inglefield (1820–1894)) during the session of the Royal Geographical Society of London on 22 November 1852, would be persuaded to know that the natural beauty of the Arctic regions cannot be surpassed by any other in the world." Though the accompanying map shows his theory concerning an extended Greenland he doesn't write about this, but mainly about his errouneous theory concerning the behavior of the Gulf Stream. Supplement IV gives an overview of the knowledge of the area around Spitsbergen and the central Arctic. It contains articles by Petermann, R. Werner, N. Dunér and A.E. Nordenskiöld, Dr. Malmgrén, Barto von Löwenigh, and G. Jäger, and is accompanied by