Early on in John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, protagonist and Victorian scientist Charles Smithson spends a solitary morning hunting fossils along the coast of southwest England. An avowed follower of Charles Darwin, Smithson extracts an exquisite fossil-specimen from the flinty rock, aiming to gift it to his fiancée. Yet, as Fowles’s narrator wryly suggests, what our scientist is unable to perceive in this small, attractive object is the menace it portends to the...