Art & Creativity Quote by Ernest Thompson Seton

Certainty gets punctured in the first breath: "There are no Rabbits in the north-west". It lands like a tidy field note, the kind explorers and administrators loved because it turns messy terrain into a manageable sentence. Then Seton immediately undercuts his own authority. "Far from final" is the tell - a refusal to let the reader confuse a snapshot for a law of nature. The rhetorical move is classic Seton: the naturalist as anti-bureaucrat, replacing imperial confidence with ecological humility.

"Practically true today" smuggles in time as a variable. Animal presence becomes seasonal, cyclical, contingent on trapping pressure and climate, not a fixed inventory. That temporal caveat is the subtext: the land doesn't hold still for our categories, and any map made of declarations is already obsolete.

Then the pivot: lynxes. If rabbits are absent, predators still show up - a quiet lesson in how ecosystems don't obey our single-species assumptions. The line reads like a corrective to simplistic thinking: you don't get to pronounce a vacuum without accounting for what feeds, migrates, or adapts.

The closing clause turns wry and almost literary: "one cannot write of ducks without mentioning water". It's a jab at writing that divorces creatures from conditions, facts from habitat. Seton is warning against nature prose (and by extension policy) that treats animals as collectible anecdotes. His intent is to reattach observation to context: not just what was seen, but what makes seeing possible - the water beneath the ducks, the changing ground beneath every supposedly final statement.