THE priority dispute dragged on with diminished intensity for another six years and during that time continued to occupy a major part of Newton's consciousness. He had never been able to lay a project down easily. Wound up as tightly as he was now, and with his honor at stake, he could not put the dispute aside simply because his antagonist had died. When Fontenelle's Éloge of Leibniz appeared, he was upset by the author's unwillingness to believe that Leibniz was a plagiarist, and he made extensive notes on the Éloge by way of correction, though he never put them to use. Although Newton had invested an immense effort in the “Account of Commercium epistolicum,” he was not satisfied with its exposition of his case–as indeed he was never finally satisfied with any work. Sometime after Leibniz's death, he composed a Historia methodi fluxionum (The History of the Method of Fluxions). Mercifully, he eventually forebore to impose this further recital of a barren chronology upon his loyal public. In 1717, when Desaguliers dug out of an old History of the Academy a discussion in which Leibniz attempted to show that the fall of the barometer in rainy weather derives from the condensation of vapor into drops which do not gravitate while they fall, Newton quickly seized it and regaled the next meeting of the Royal Society with a demonstration that Leibniz's explanation could account at most for a small fraction of observed barometric variations.