The Louisiana Board of Levee Commissioners was organized in 1865. The state board of health was the first one effectively organized (1855) in the United States. It encountered many difficulties, and until the definite proof of the stegomyia hypothesis of yellow-fever inoculation made by the United States army surgeons in Cuba in 1900, the greatest problem seemed insoluble. Since that time conditions of health in New Orleans have been revolutionized (in 1907 state control of maritime quarantine on the Mississippi was supplanted by that of the national government), and smaller cities and towns have been stimulated to take action by her example. Sanitary institutes are held by the state board at various towns each year for the instruction of the public. Boards of appraisers and equalization oversee the administration of the tax system; the cost of collection, owing to the fee system for payment of collectors, was higher than in any other state of the Union until 1907, when the fees were greatly reduced. The state assessment in 1901 totalled $301,215,222 and in 1907 was $508,000,000. Schools and levees absorb about half of all revenues, leaving half for the payment of interest on the state debt (bonded debt on 1st of April 1908, $11,108,300) and for expenses of government. A general primary election law for the selection, by the voters, of candidates for state office came into effect in 1906. _Law._--Louisiana has been peculiar among the states of the Union in the history of the development of its legal system. In Louisiana alone (as the state is known to-day), out of all the territory acquired from France as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was the civil law so established under French and Spanish rule that it persisted under American dominion. In all the other states formed from the Purchase, the civil law, never existent practically, was early expressly abrogated, and the common law of England established in its place. After O'Reilly established his power in 1769 (see _History_, below), the Spanish law was supreme. All the old codes of the Peninsula, as well as the laws of the Indies and special royal decrees and schedules, were in force in the colony. The United States left the task of altering the laws to the people, as far as there was no conflict between them and the Constitution of the United States and fundamental American legal customs. Copies of the Spanish codes were very rare, and some of them could not be had in the colonies. Discussions of the Roman Institute and Pandects were common in the deliberations of the courts. Great confusion prevailed in the first years of American dominion owing to the diversities of languages and the grafting of such Anglo-Saxon institutions as the jury upon the older system. A provisional code of judicial procedure, prepared by Edward Livingston, was in effect in 1805 to 1825. The earliest digest, completed in 1808, was mainly a compilation of Spanish laws.