  We study chemical reactions with complex mechanisms under two assumptions:
(i) intermediates are present in small amounts (this is the quasi-steady-state
hypothesis or QSS) and (ii) they are in equilibrium relations with substrates
(this is the quasiequilibrium hypothesis or QE). Under these assumptions, we
prove the generalized mass action law together with the basic relations between
kinetic factors, which are sufficient for the positivity of the entropy
production but hold even without microreversibility, when the detailed balance
is not applicable. Even though QE and QSS produce useful approximations by
themselves, only the combination of these assumptions can render the
possibility beyond the "rarefied gas" limit or the "molecular chaos"
hypotheses. We do not use any a priori form of the kinetic law for the chemical
reactions and describe their equilibria by thermodynamic relations. The
transformations of the intermediate compounds can be described by the Markov
kinetics because of their low density ({\em low density of elementary events}).
This combination of assumptions was introduced by Michaelis and Menten in 1913.
In 1952, Stueckelberg used the same assumptions for the gas kinetics and
produced the remarkable semi-detailed balance relations between collision rates
in the Boltzmann equation that are weaker than the detailed balance conditions
but are still sufficient for the Boltzmann $H$-theorem to be valid. Our results
are obtained within the Michaelis-Menten-Stueckelbeg conceptual framework.
