Frobenius, in 1878, wrote an important work on matrices On linear substitutions and bilinear forms although he seemed unaware of Cayley's work. Frobenius in this paper deals with coefficients of forms and does not use the term matrix. However he proved important results on canonical matrices as representatives of equivalence classes of matrices. He cites Kronecker and Weierstrass as having considered special cases of his results in 1874 and 1868 respectively. Frobenius also proved the general result that a matrix satisfies its characteristic equation. This 1878 paper by Frobenius also contains the definition of the rank of a matrix which he used in his work on canonical forms and the definition of orthogonal matrices.