 They were referring to the dissipation function of Rayleigh (1873) that was used also by Onsager (1931, I, 1931, II).On pages 78–80 of their book Glansdorff and Prigogine (1971) consider the stability of laminar flow that was pioneered by Helmholtz; they concluded that at a stable steady state of sufficiently slow laminar flow, the dissipation function was minimum.These advances have led to proposals for various extremal principles for the "self-organized" régimes that are possible for systems governed by classical linear and non-linear non-equilibrium thermodynamical laws, with stable stationary régimes being particularly investigated.