Beer's law: Much later, in 1852, the German scientist August Beer studied another attenuation relation. In the introduction to his classic paper, he wrote: "The absorption of light during the irradiation of a colored substance has often been the object of experiment; but attention has always been directed to the relative diminution of the various colors or, in the case of crystalline bodies, the relation between the absorption and the direction of polarization. Concerning the absolute magnitude of the absorption that a particular ray of light suffers during its propagation through an absorbing medium, there is no information available." By studying absorption of red light in colored aqueous solutions of various salts, he concluded that "the transmittance of a concentrated solution can be derived from a measurement of the transmittance of a dilute solution". It is clear that he understood the exponential relationship, as he wrote: "If λ λ is the coefficient (fraction) of diminution, then this coefficient (fraction) will have the value λ λ 2 for double this thickness." Furthermore Beer stated: "We shall take the absorption coefficient to be the coefficient giving the diminution in amplitude suffered by a light ray as it passes through a unit length of an absorbing material. We then have, according to theory, and as I have found verified by experiment, λ λ = μ μ D where μ μ is the absorption coefficient and D the length of the absorbing material traversed in the experiment." This is the relationship that might properly be called Beer's law. There is no evidence that Beer saw concentration and path length as symmetrical variables in an equation in the manner of the Beer-Lambert law.