¶1Harry C. Weeks, Fort Worth, Tex., Weeks, Bird, Cannon & Appleman, Fort Worth, Tex., of counsel, for appellant.
¶2Carlton Fox, Ellis N. Slack, Sp. Assts. to Atty. Gen., Charles S. Lyon, Asst. Atty. Gen., H. Brian Holland, Asst. Atty. Gen., A. F. Prescott, and Joseph F. Goetten, Sp. Assts. to Atty. Gen., Frank B. Potter, U. S. Atty., Fort Worth, Tex., William Cantrell, Jr., Asst. U. S. Atty., Dallas, Tex., for appellee.
¶3Before HUTCHESON, Chief Judge, and RUSSELL and STRUM, Circuit Judges.
¶5The suit was to recover overpayments of taxes for the year 1945. The claim was that an exchange in that year of an undivided fractional oil, gas, and other mineral interest in Ector County, Texas, for overriding royalty and mineral interests in and to the oil in and under named leasehold estates in Gregg County, Texas, until grantee had received oil of the value of $43,000, was, under Section 112(b) (l),1 an exchange solely in kind of property held for Productive Use or Investment; and that the commissioner had erroneously rejected their claim.
¶6Tried on stipulated facts, there was a judgment for defendant, the district judge stating orally and briefly his reasons therefor.2
¶7*550Appealing from- the judgment, plaintiffs, here urging its reversal, thus state the question for our decision.3 Putting forward and strongly relying, in support of its position, on the decision of this court in Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Crichton, 122 F.2d 181, appellants insist that there is no basis in either the statute or in Treasury Regulation 111, Sec. 29.-112(b) (1)-1 for the district court’s view that because the mineral interests were of indefinite, and the oil payments were of definite, duration, that is, were to cease when oil of a named value had been obtained from the property, the exchange was not of property of like kind.
¶8The appellee, planting himself on illustration No. 2 in the regulation4 as controlling here, insists that the mineral interest in the Ector County lands was an interest in fee and that in the Gregg County lands, for which it was exchanged, was a leasehold of a fee which does not have thirty or more years to run, and that therefore under the regulation the interests exchanged were not of like kind.
¶9We cannot agree. In the first place, both Interests exchanged were interests in land.5 In the second place, neither interest was a “leasehold of a fee” in the sense in which that term is used in the regulation. Both were interests in minerals in place. Both were therefore interests in land, interests not in personal but in real property, in short, real rights.6
¶10Bearing in mind that neither the statute nor the regulation requires that the things exchanged be identical but only that they be “of a like kind”, we think it would be difficult to find interests more like in kind than are these mineral interests. Certainly if, as we held in the Crichton case, an exchange of taxpayer’s undivided interest in minerals in unimproved country land for an undivided interest in improved city land, was an exchange solely for property of like kind, the exchange here of mineral interests for mineral interests was not an exchange of property of unlike kind merely because one of the mineral interests was of indefinite, the other of definite duration.
¶11What we said in that case 7 applies with fullest force here. The judgment is reversed and the cause is remanded with directions to enter .judgment for plaintiffs.