Minihalo Model of the Lyman-Alpha Forest in a New Light

We show that some observational properties of low- and intermediate-redshift Lyman-alpha forest clouds, e.g., the column density distribution function may be explained in more details by the classical minihalo model postulated by Rees. In addition, we propose a simple way of estimating the quantity of baryons residing in absorbing clouds in arbitary redshift range, unlike the estimates based only on the observed forest lines.