History of the four-colour problem It is stated in many places that the first published reference to the four-colour problem (aka the four-color problem) was an anonymous article in The Athenæum of April 14, 1860, attributed to de Morgan.
I was poking around in earlier issues of The Athenæum and found this on page 726, June 10, 1854:

*Tinting maps.—In tinting maps, it is desirable for the sake of
   distinctness to use as few colours as possible, and at the same
   time no two conterminous divisions ought to be tinted the same.
   Now, I have found by experience that four colours are necessary
   and sufficient for this purpose,—but I cannot prove that this is
   the case, unless the whole number of divisions does not exceed five.
   I should like to see (or know where I can find) a general proof of
   this apparently simple proposition, which I am surprised never
   to have met with in any mathematical work.   F.G.
I cannot find any mention of this item anywhere, so my question is whether  this information is new.
As far as I can tell, "F.G." is not identified by the magazine.  Two obvious candidates are Francis Guthrie and his brother Frederic Guthrie, who discussed the question starting in 1852.  An outside possibility is Francis Galton, who was involved in the problem at a later date (see Crilly, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep. 22, 2005), pp.285-304).  So my second question is "who was F.G."?
Added: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2852 Suggestions for improvement welcome.
 A: I am making this an answer even though it is nothing like an answer simply so that I can include a link to the page in question with a fair guarantee that the URL will not be broken.  It is a fantastic find.  I have trouble visualizing the meaning of "I was poking around in earlier issues of The Athenæum" after looking at the page itself.  I assume you were using various search criteria.  I don't know how else you would have found this particular needle in this particular haystack.  For those that need strong glasses, the paragraph in question is in the middle column, one paragraph from the top.
A: This is very interesting. Congratulations of finding it -- I'll adapt my 'Four colors suffice' book accordingly in the forthcoming new edition.
Brendan, if you write it up, make sure that you always write 'De Morgan' and not the incorrect 'de Morgan'.
Robin Wilson
A: First, congratulations to Brendan for a remarkable discovery.  I think it
opens up the possibility of more documentary evidence on the early history of the 4CC.  We know that in addition to the famous letter to Hamilton in 1852, DeM
also wrote to Whewell (9/12/53) and Ellis (24/6/54) about it.  I discussed these
letters in a short paper in the Archive for History of Exact Sciences in 1983
(pp163-170).  The fact that the letter to Ellis is very soon after the the FG
Athenaeum piece raises some obvious questions. Did Ellis write to DeM about
the 4CC?  Why is the DeM to Ellis letter in the Whewell papers at Trinity?
Was there other correspondence  stemming from the FG piece?
