Making creatures make themselves

As I was skimming through Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), a book that injects a fair amount of Lamarckian evolution into a children's moral fable (the character Mother Carey "make[s] creatures make themselves."), I came across a section that made me grin.

During the course of the story the protagonist Tom is told that he needs to go see the Gairfowl, an old Great auk bird of high breeding (the Great auk just having become extinct in 1852. Thanks to Allen for the correction about the meaning of "Gairfowl."). I do not know what Kingsley thought of the evolution of birds (T.H. Huxley had only just begun to teach his students about the Sauropsida [birds + reptiles] when the book was published), but I did find the Gairfowl's snobby commentary amusing in light of what we presently know of birds origins;

Tom came up to her very humbly, and made his bow; and the first thing she said was -

"Have you wings? Can you fly?"

"Oh dear, no, ma'am; I should not think of such thing," said cunning little Tom.

"Then I shall have great pleasure in talking to you, my dear. It is quite refreshing nowadays to see anything without wings. They must all have wings, forsooth, now, every new upstart sort of bird, and fly. What can they want with flying, and raising themselves above their proper station in life? In the days of my ancestors no birds ever thought of having wings, and did very well without; and now they all laugh at me because I keep to the good old fashion. Why, the very marrocks and dovekies have got wings, the vulgar creatures, and poor little ones enough they are; and my own cousins, too, the razor-bills, who are gentlefolk born, and ought to know better than to ape their inferiors." [emphasis mine]

The attitude of the Gairfowl is more important for another reason. Although we often talk about the history of science in terms of who thought what (and who disagreed with whom) social and political context should not be overlooked, especially in the case of evolution. Some among the comfortable classes were concerned that if the idea of evolution became widespread in England that the country would undergo a bloody revolution like France had undergone, the idea that you could change your station in life being a dangerous concept to those who wanted to maintain their influence. It doesn't matter that Darwin kept discussion in On the Origin of Species to scientific concepts; from the time of Lamarck onward some people interpreted evolution as a "revolutionary" area in more ways than one.