The New Year Quote by William Bartram

Bartram is doing something quietly radical here: he’s smuggling dignity into the nonhuman world by using the vocabulary of human deliberation. “Economy of the animal creation” sounds like Enlightenment bookkeeping - observe the system, tally the parts - but what he “find[s]” isn’t mechanistic clockwork. It’s “premeditation, perseverance, resolution,” a cascade of moral-psychological terms that, in the 18th century, were typically reserved for people (and, by implication, for those people deemed fully rational). The line doesn’t just admire animals; it drafts them into the category of agents.

The subtext is a rebuke to casual human superiority. Bartram’s “but a very little attention” needles the reader: you don’t need microscopes or scripture to perceive intelligence in other creatures; you need humility and the willingness to look. That rhetorical move matters because it relocates authority from inherited hierarchy to firsthand observation - a hallmark of natural history at the moment when Europeans were trying to classify, own, and exploit the “New World” as much as understand it.

“Consumate artifice” is the most charged phrase. Artifice implies craft, even deception - qualities that complicate the sentimental idea of nature as pure instinct. Bartram’s animals aren’t pastoral symbols; they’re strategists. In an era that often treated wildlife as scenery or resource, he frames it as a community of problem-solvers with purposes of their own, anticipating the modern ecological intuition that behavior is adaptive, inventive, and worthy of ethical consideration.