With Mars discovery has from the start waited on apparent disk. To this end every optical advance has contributed from the time of Galileo’s opera-glass to the present day. For apparent distance stands determined by the size of the eye. But although it is the telescopic eye that has increased, not the distance that has diminished, the effect has been kin to being carried nearer the planet and so to a scanning of its disk with constantly increasing particularity. Mankind has to all intents and purposes been journeying Marsward through the years. Any historic account of the planet, therefore, becomes a chronicle of seeming bodily approach. Perhaps no vivider way of making this evident and at the same time no better preface to the present work could be devised than by putting before the eye in orderly succession the maps made of Mars by the leading areographers of their day, since the planet first began to be charted sixty-five years ago. The procedure is as much as possible like standing at the telescope and seeing the phenomena steadily disclose. Seen thus in order the facts speak for themselves. They show that from first to last no doubt concerning what was seen existed in the minds of those competent to judge by systematic study of the planet at first hand, and furthermore, from their mutual corroboration, that this confidence was well placed. For, far from there being any conflict of authorities in the case, those entitled to an opinion in the matter prove singularly at one. Beginning with Maedler in 1840 the gallery of such portraitures of the planet comprises those by Kaiser, Green and Schiaparelli, continued since Schiaparelli’s time by the earlier ones of the present writer. To this list has been added one by Flammarion, which though not solely from his own work gives so just a representation of what was known at the date, 1876, as to merit inclusion. The remarkable drawings of Dawes and the excellent ones of Lockyer in 1862-1864 were never combined into maps by the observers, and though the former’s were so synthesized by Proctor in 1867, the result was conformed to what Proctor thought ought to be and so is not really a transcript of the drawings themselves.