In 1902 J.G. Bartholomew wrote: "It is only a fair tribute to Augustus Petermann to say that no one has done more than he to advance modern cartography, and no man has ever left a more fitting monument to himself than his "Mitteilungen", which still bears his name, and under the editorship of Dr. Supan, is the leading geographical authority in all countries. But to the absorbing fascination of his work Petermann sacrificed all other interests in life and died a martyr to geography". That fame perished quickly was shown by Hermann Wagner in his article of 1912, when he commemorates the merits of the Gotha epoch under Petermann and finds that nobody up till then had written about the making of the history of geography and cartography and that all those pioneers were all but forgotten, even though the journal carried Petermann's name since 1879.