WEEKS LAW. 19 



proved by the Secretary of Agriculture under this act until the legis- 

 lature of the State in which the land lies shall have consented to the 

 acquisition of such land by the United States for the purposes of 

 preserving the navigability of navigable streams. 



Passing upon, titles. 



Sec. 8. That the Secretary of Agriculture may do all things neces- 

 sary to secure the safe title in the United States to the lands to be 

 acquired under this act, but no payment shall be made for any such 

 lands until the title shall be satisfactory to the Attorney General and 

 shall be vested in the United States. 



Reservation of timber and minerals. 



Sec. 9. That such acquisition may in any case be conditioned upon 

 the exception and reservation to the owner from whom title passes to 

 the United States of the minerals and of the merchantable timber, or 

 either or any part of them, within or upon such lands at the date of 

 the conveyance, but in every case such exception and reservation and 

 the time within which such timber shall be removed and the rules and 

 regulations under which the cutting and removal of such timber and 

 the mining and removal of such minerals shall be done shall be ex- 

 pressed in the written instrument of conveyance, and thereafter the 

 mining, cutting, and removal of the minerals and timber so excepted 

 and reserved shall be done only under and in obedience to the rules 

 and regulations so expressed. 



Sale of agricultural lands. 



Sec. 10. That inasmuch as small areas of land chiefly valuable for 

 agriculture may of necessity or by inadvertence be included in tracts 

 acquired under this act, the Secretary of Agriculture may, in his dis- 

 cretion, and he is hereby authorized, upon application or otherwise, to 

 examine and ascertain the location and extent of such areas as in his 

 opinion may be occupied for agricultural purposes without injury to 

 the forests or to stream flow and which are not needed for public pur- 

 poses, and may list and describe the same by metes and bounds, or 

 otherwise, and offer them for sale as homesteads at their true value, to 

 be fixed by him, to actual settlers, in tracts not exceeding eighty acres 

 in area, under such joint rules and regulations as the Secretary of 

 Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior may prescribe ; and in 

 case of such sale the jurisdiction over the lands sold shall, ipso facto, 

 revert to the State in which the lands sold lie. And no right, title, 

 interest, or claim in or to any lands acquired under this act, or the 

 waters thereon, or the products, resources, or use thereof after such 

 lands shall have been so acquired, shall be initiated or perfected, ex- 

 cept as in this section provided. 



Administration as National Forests. 



Sec.11. That, subject to the provisions of the last preceding sec- 

 tion, the lands acquired under this act shall be permanently reserved, 

 held, and administered as national forest lands under the provisions 

 of section twenty-four of the act approved March third, eighteen hun- 

 dred and ninety-one (volume twenty-six, Statutes at Large, page 

 eleven hundred and three), and acts supplemental to and amendatory 

 thereof. And the Secretary of Agriculture may from time to time 



