Petermann was sometimes accused of being an 'armchair' geographer as he never traveled wide or experienced new discoveries with his own eyes, but the quality of the maps and geographic ideas he produced proves the accusation unfair. Some people are better at observing and describing circumstances and phenomena, others are better at interpretation of data. Petermann's greatest accomplishment lay in the interpretation and evaluation of sometimes contradictory sources, and his great legacy is that he was able to develop this faculty in most of his pupils in such a fine way that geography at large has profited from it ever since. Should one criticize the journal under his direction for not being geographically innovative then one may come nearer to the truth. Many articles are of a descriptive physical nature, with many intimate details in the explorers' colloquial style, and hardly any tries to find explanations for the physical phenomena. Most emphasis is laid on geomorphology and geology — old disciplines by then with their own technical language already — meteorology, botany and biology. Articles on anthropogeography usually reach no further than ethnographic descriptions of regions. It is still the era of data-gathering and in this they were not far beyond the cameralistic nature of the first half of the nineteenth century. One should have expected more articles concerning (parts of) Europe, but a count in the annuals for 1860–1864 shows that only 16% of the articles and 22% of the "Kleinere Mitteilungen" (small communications) concerned Europe. As accommodation one might say that the journal, though geographic by nature, was aimed at popular use. That was one of its strengths, as shown by its large circulation.