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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY: 
sume the charge of schools ; in others, like Aurora, Illinois, the 
cit}' does not administer the schools, which remain under the 
districts into which the school township was divided. 
A citizen may therefore find himself under three sets of taxes 
for schools — the township and the district for common schools 
and the high school township for its specialty. He may have in 
addition the civil township tax and the corporation tax. When 
the school district is given a charter making it independent of 
its town, the succession of taxes is modified. A volume would 
hardly suffice to instance all the variations and combinations of 
duties of the taxpayer in different states, or even in different 
j)arts of the same state, growing out of the separately chartered 
taxing powers and their limited independencies. 
The cities of Washington, D. C., which has practicalh’^ absorbed 
Washington county and become identified with the District of 
Columbia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ; New York; Brooklyn 
(.January 1, 189b), New York ; New Orleans, Louisiana, coexten- 
sive with Philadelphia, New York, and Kings counties and 
Orleans parish respectively, but continuing to exercise some func- 
tions of counties, and San Francisco, California, identical with 
San Francisco county, represent simply a growth by which cities 
have filled county boundaries, and not an independence of 
counties. 
GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 
The receipt at a somewhat late hour of two important articles published 
in this numher of the magazine has necessitated the holding over until 
April of the entire Department of Geographic Literature. 
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 
SOCIETY, SESSION iSqs-’qG. 
Special Meeting, January 31, 1896. — Vice-President Greely in the chair. 
Mr Richard Villafranca, Commissioner General from Costa Rica to the 
Atlanta Exposition, read a paper, with lantern-slide illustrations, on 
The Geography, People, and Resources of Costa Rica. 
Regular Meeting, February 7, Vice-President ^Merriam in the chair. 
Mr W J McGee delivered an address, illustrated by lantern slides 
(mo.stly from original photographs), entitled “A Sojourn in Seriland: 
Explorations among Hostile Savages of the Gulf of California.” 
