On 29 March 1819, Biot presented a memoir in which he proposed simple generalizations of Malus's rules for a crystal with two axes, and reported that both generalizations seemed to be confirmed by experiment. For the velocity law, the squared sine was replaced by the product of the sines of the angles from the ray to the two axes (Biot's sine law). And for the polarization of the ordinary ray, the plane of the ray and the axis was replaced by the plane bisecting the dihedral angle between the two planes each of which contained the ray and one axis (Biot's dihedral law). Biot's laws meant that a biaxial crystal with axes at a small angle, cleaved in the plane of those axes, behaved nearly like a uniaxial crystal at near-normal incidence; this was fortunate because gypsum, which had been used in chromatic-polarization experiments, is biaxial.