Another macroscopic consequence of microscopic reversibility is the symmetry of kinetic coefficients, the so-called reciprocal relations. The reciprocal relations were discovered in the 19th century by Thomson and Helmholtz for some phenomena but the general theory was proposed by Lars Onsager in 1931. He found also the connection between the reciprocal relations and detailed balance. For the equations of the law of mass action the reciprocal relations appear in the linear approximation near equilibrium as a consequence of the detailed balance conditions. According to the reciprocal relations, the damped oscillations in homogeneous closed systems near thermodynamic equilibria are impossible because the spectrum of symmetric operators is real. Therefore, the relaxation to equilibrium in such a system is monotone if it is sufficiently close to the equilibrium.