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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 expressed 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, 

 except 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 provision^ 

 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 supplementary to and amend- 

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

 time divide the lands acquired under this act into such specific Na- 



