THE Editor has elsewhere[128] referred to the great uncertainty attending the identification of minor coast localities in the earliest maps. The most trustworthy interpreters recognize two important canons,—namely, that cartographical names during a long series of years, and at an era of exploration forerunning settlements, are always suspicious and often delusive, as Professor Bache has pointed out in the _Coast Survey Report_ for 1855 (p. 10); and that direction is likely to be right, and distance easily wrong, as Humboldt has explained. Nothing is more seductive than to let a spirit of dogmatism direct in the interpretation of the early maps, and there is no field of research in which predisposition to belief may lead one so wrongly. It was largely in the spirit of finding what they sought, that the early map-makers fashioned their charts; and their interpretation depends quite as much on geographical views current in those days as upon geographical facts patent in these days. The study of early American cartography may be said to have begun with Humboldt; and in this restricted field no one has since rendered greater service than Dr. Kohl.[129] Mr. Brevoort, not without justice, calls him “the most able comparative geographer of our day.”[130] The labor which Dr. Kohl performed took expression not only in his publications, but also in the collection of copies of early maps which he formed and annotated for the United States Government twenty-five years ago. His later printed books, using necessarily much of the same material, may be riper from longer experience; but the Washington Collection, as he formed it, is still valuable, and deserves to be better known. It belongs to the Department of State, and consists of not far from four hundred maps, following printed and manuscript originals. They are carefully and handsomely executed, but with little attempt at reproduction in fac-simile. By favor of the Secretary of State, and through the interest of Theodore F. Dwight, Esq., the librarian of that department, the collection has been intrusted to the Editor for use in the present work and for the preparation of an annotated calendar of the maps which will be printed by Harvard University. [Illustration: THE ADMIRAL’S MAP, 1513.] Besides this collection in the State Department (which cost the Government nearly $6,000), the Reports of the United States Coast-Survey[131] describe three other collections, accompanied by descriptive texts, which he made for that office, and which he proposed to call collectively “The Hydrographic Annals of the United States.” They repeat many of the maps belonging to the State Department Collection. These supplemental collections are,— 1. On the eastern coast of the United States, giving copies of 41 maps; the titles of 155 surveys of the coast between 1612 and 1851; a list of 291 works on the early explorations of the coast; and an historical memoir on such voyages, from the Northmen down.