232 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



umes an account of his travels. The maps illustrating this work were, 

 as the author writes in his preface, " executed with artistic skill and 

 scientific precision by Dr. Petermann." Henceforward the exploration 

 of the " dark continent " was one of the two dominant thoughts of 

 Petermann's mind, the other being north-polar exploration. He has 

 awakened throughout Europe a lively interest in both of these depart- 

 ments of research, and there is no doubt that to him is due much of 

 the advancement made in geographical knowledge during the last thirty 

 years ; and recent German explorers of Africa, as Heuglin, Munzinger, 

 Rohlfs, Mauch, Schvveinfurth, and Nachtigal, fouad in Petermann a pow- 

 erful advocate to enlist popular sympathy for their labors. In high 

 northern exploration he was a believer in an open Polar Sea, therein 

 agreeing with our own great navigators, Kane and Hall, but his favor- 

 ite route to the pole was along the east coast of Greenland, while 

 our countrymen prefer the route through Davis Strait, along the west 

 coast. 



In 1854 he took up his residence at Gotha, having been appointed 

 Director of Justus Perthes's Geographical Institute, the most extensive 

 establishment in the world for the production of maps and charts ; this 

 position he held down to his death. That now well-known monthly 

 journal of geography, M'tttheilungen cms Justus Perthes^ GeograpTii- 

 scher Anstalt, was founded in 1855, succeeding Berghaus's geographical 

 annual, the " Geographisches Jahrbuch." Petermann assumed the edi- 

 torship of the new magazine, which quickly reached an eminence unat- 

 tained by any other periodical of its class. The editor impressed his 

 personality on every page of his magazine, and it is commonly known 

 as Petermann'' s Mittheihingen. It was in the same year, 1855, that 

 he received from the University of Gottingen the degree of Ph. D. 

 Geographical societies throughout the Avorld have enrolled his name in 

 the lists of their honorary membership, and in 18G9 the Emperor of 

 Austria conferred on him the order of the Iron Crown, in recognition 

 of his services to arctic exploration. Some 3-ears ago he was appointed 

 Professor of Geography in the Polytechnic School at Gotha {not in the 

 University of Gotha, as some of the newspapers have it, and that for 

 the sufficient reason that Gotha has no university). He visited the United 

 States in 1876, and was received with fitting honors by the American 

 Geographical Society of New York. 



For a few days before his death Petermann suffered from a painful 

 attack of bronchitis, coughing almost continually. At the same time 

 he complained of a headache so intense that the slightest touch of a 

 finger on tlie forehead caused him an agony of pain. To these physi- 

 cal ills were added domestic troubles of an extremely aggravating kind, 

 and the result Avas a pitiable state of nervous excitement, amounting 

 almost to frenzy. Life seemed unendurable, and, to terminate his 

 sufferings, the great geographer died by his own hand on September 

 25th. His father and brother had died in the same manner. 



