There’s only one officially authenticated photograph of reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. It’s a daguerreotype taken in 1847 when she was 16 years old, years before she wrote the poems that would make her famous when they were published after her death. Amherst College, founded by Samuel Dickinson, Emily’s grandfather, received it from a donor along with other Dickinson papers in 1956, and the ownership record is clear and unbroken back to Emily’s sister Lavinia.

Other alleged pictures have cropped up over the years, but none of them have ultimately proven authentic. This was not unexpected since Emily herself declared in July of 1862 to have no photographs of herself. In a well-known correspondence with abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Atlantic Monthly columnist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily responded to his request that she send him a picture as follows:

Could you believe me–without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur–and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves–Would this do just as well?

It often alarms father. He says death might occur, and he has moulds of all the rest, but has no mould of me; but I noticed the quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor. You will think no caprice of me.

She means “quick” in the sense of vitality, the essence of life, which she thinks drains out of photographs after a few days, hence her refusal to sit for a portrait even at her beloved father’s behest.

But now there’s a new contender for the title of only picture of Emily Dickinson as an adult poet, and the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections thinks it may just be the real deal. The image is a daguerreotype taken around 1859 of two women sitting next to each other, one with her arm around the other. It belongs to a daguerreotype collector who bought it in a group of items from a Springfield junk dealer in 1995. The collector noticed the woman on the left bore a strong resemblance to the sole picture of Dickinson, so he began to research the subject, starting with an attempt to identify the woman on the right.

After years of study, he was able to confirm thanks to two moles on her chin under either side of her mouth that the sitter on the right was Mrs. Kate Scott Turner Anthon, a school friend of Sue Gilbert Dickinson, wife of Emily’s brother Austin. Austin and Sue lived in the house next door to Emily, and Kate stayed with them several times starting in January of 1859. She struck up a close friendship with Emily, as their extant correspondence attests to, until they had a falling out about a year later.

A book published in 1951 contended that their relationship was romantic, that the falling out was a break-up. It was not well-received by reviewers at the time, to say the least, but if this picture does prove to be incontestably authentic, the book might be seen in a different light. After all, Emily wouldn’t have a picture taken for her father, so there would have had to be a powerful impetus to persuade her to sit for a picture with her arm around her friend.

In 2007, the collector showed the daguerreotype to Amherst College Archives and Special Collections staff. Their Dickinson experts have been researching it ever since. High resolution scans of both the 1847 picture and the 1859 were compared, and the physical features of the potential Emily match the confirmed Emily. Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center ophthalmologist Dr. Susan Pepin, who has made a study of Emily’s eye problems, examined the eyes on both images and declared them a match. From Dr. Pepin’s report (pdf):

The two women have the same eye opening size with the right eye opening being slightly larger than the left. The left lower lid in both women sits lower than the right lower lid. The right upper lid from the crease in the lid has more length than the left upper lid. Also, the left upper lid margin height sits lower that the right upper lid margin height (0.1 mm ptosis OS).

Other similar facial features are evident between the women in the daguerreotypes. The right earlobe is higher on both women. The inferonasal corneal light reflex suggests corneal curvature similarity, allowing us to speculate about similar astigmatism in the two women. Both women have a central hair cowlick. Finally, both women have a more prominent left nasolabial fold.

After a thorough examination of both of these women’s facial features as viewed from the 1847 and 1859 daguerreotypes, I believe strongly that these are the same people.

Another argument in favor of authenticity is, oddly, an anachronism. Potential Emily’s dress is at least 10 years out of date. In fact, it has several significant elements in common with the dress worn by the teenage Emily 12 years earlier. This suits the adult Emily just fine, since she was determinedly unfashionable. She told her friend Abiah Root in 1854: “I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.”

Amherst experts together with the Emily Dickinson Museum’s experts went through their textile collection to see if there was a potential match for the blue check fabric of the potential Emily’s dress, and as long a shot as this was, they actually found a sample that fits in pattern and sheen. The picture is too small to make it a definite match to the swatch, but future research with specialized tools will hopefully be able to magnify the garment in the picture so that a match can be confirmed or denied.

Kate is wearing a black dress whose style is from the mid-1850s. She was widowed for the first time in 1857, so that fits.

The authentication search is ongoing. The picture is available for viewing upon request at the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. Researchers are asking the public to come forward with any relevant information that might be squirreled away in their attics.

Amherst’s Emily Dickinson Collection has a wealth of digitized manuscripts and letters by Emily Dickinson. Given Emily’s famously idiosyncratic syntax which was often conventionalized by publishers, it’s a genuine thrill to see poems like A bird came down the walk in her own hand.

In the mid-1760s, Prince Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau took his architect friend Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff on a Grand Tour of Europe, as was de rigeur for well-to-do youth of that time. They traveled through Italy, the Netherlands, England and France, absorbing the cultural lessons of antiquity and the Renaissance. Pompeii, which had been rediscovered only in 1748, and the ever-smoking Vesuvius that loomed in the background made a lasting impression on the young prince.

When he returned home to Wörlitz, the prince, Erdmannsdorff and landscape architect Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck set to creating a mini-Grand Tour in Leopold’s back yard. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals, the nature-as-educator philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the English garden movement that valued pastoral beauty over the formal landscapes of the Baroque period, over the next decades the prince made almost his entire principality into a public garden with river-fed canals, Neoclassical buildings (including the family’s home castle and separate kitchen), a Chinese pagoda, a synagogue modeled after the Temple of Hercules Victor in Rome, a neo-Gothic Christian church, a miniature Pantheon with reliefs of gods both classical and Egyptian, temples dedicated to Flora and Venus, bridges in various styles, a labyrinth, and a lake with a bucolic Rousseau Island (a copy of the philosopher’s original tomb in Ermenonville; his body no longer rests there as it was moved to the Panthéon in Paris after the French Revolution) in the middle.

The project took decades to complete, but the final result was a conceptually unified monument to the Enlightenment view of history, art, nature and beauty as ennobling and educational for everyone from prince to pauper. Leopold opened the park to the public from the earliest days and even though it experienced some rough treatment and neglect in its East German period, it is again open today. The park, now a UNESCO World Heritage site known as the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz, is a 55-square-mile wonderland adorned with more than 40 follies and architectural features in diverse styles.

There’s one patch of the park which is particularly wondrous: a wee furnace-fed volcano. Twenty-plus years after his trip to Pompeii, Prince Leopold built himself a pet Vesuvius that could erupt on command. It took six years to make and was complete in 1794. The prince would have guests over to watch it erupt, but he left behind no specifics on how exactly he made the fireworks happen. Only one contemporary painting of the event survives and one jeering but helpfully detailed review from a critic.

After Leopold’s death in 1817, his Vesuvius went dormant due to his heir’s lack of interest in the spectacle. The park was maintained for the next century and a half, but the volcano not so much. The garden as a whole survived World War II relatively unscathed. The worst treatment it received was at German hands when the synagogue’s interior was destroyed during Kristallnacht in November of 1938. It was only the courageous intervention of the park’s director, Hans Hallervorden, that kept the building itself from being destroyed; he was promptly fired for his trouble.

After the war, the closest the volcano came to erupting again was when its new East German masters burned some tires in the furnace. Charming spectacle, I’m sure, and how fragrant. I’m sure the crowds came for miles to see the tire fire. By 1983, the volcano was condemned. Some rocks had fallen and killed a visitor, so that was that.

In 2004, the park management decided to enlist the aid of Brandenburg Technical University chemistry professor Wolfgang Spyra to reignite the volcano’s fires.

“A volcano that can’t explode is a very sad volcano, and I wanted to make it happy again,” Spyra says. “We wanted to help the volcano get its identity back.”

Could he be any more awesome? Answer: yes, because he signs his emails “the Eruptor.” I heart this man.

Spyra researched the historical eruptions, and using the one painting and the one critic’s review, he was able to get a solid idea of the dimensions of the eruptions. He investigated what kind of firepower Leopold would have had available to him, and how the three furnaces underneath the volcano and the reservoir of water in front of the crater were used to create the impression of explosion and lava flow.

So in the summer of 2005, pet Vesuvius erupted again, now with the addition of sound effects through speakers.

Then, with a final rumble of drums and thunder, the moment arrives: red flames flickered at the top of the volcano, growing into a thick column of smoke.

Red-tinged water begins to flow from the crater, churning the still lake below. Sharp, loud explosions send sparks shooting into the sky. Hidden in the volcano’s peak is an 86-square-foot oven packed with fresh pine needles. Once lit, they roar into smoky fire, sending sparks high into the night sky along with the billowing smoke.

As the needles burn above their heads, Brandenburg Technical University students in gas masks rush from fireplace to fireplace in the room below, squirting lighter fluid on blazing wood fires and tossing in special powder to create brightly colored smoke that pours out from underneath the summit of the volcano.

Then, red-tinged water begins to flow from the crater, churning the still lake below. To create the illusion of flowing lava, Spyra first filled the artificial pond at the top of the crater. As the volcanic “eruption” peaks, the water is released over a ledge to form a waterfall, lit from behind by bright red Bengal fire.

Throughout, sharp, loud explosions send sparks shooting into the sky, jolting onlookers with each loud bang. The effect is produced using mortars, familiar to any 18th-century artillery expert.

Every year the volcano erupts again, but they don’t announce the exact date and time because, duh, volcanoes don’t give warnings. People lucky enough to be in the vicinity of the park when the rumblings begin just hightail it to the shores of the lake to enjoy the show.

Here’s this year’s eruption, which took place on the anniversary of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii. I think the eruption from 2010 is more dramatic, so I’ve embedded it below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJxrx_c3b8&w=430]

Gary Jackson, owner of Multinational K9 Dog Training in Brisbane, Australia, has been training dogs in everything from basic obedience to highly specialized detection for government and corporations for decades. Now he can add another specialty to his roster of pioneering cane toad, koala and quoll detection dogs: Migaloo, the world’s first dog trained to detect archaeological human remains.

Unlike cadaver dogs, which use their advanced olfactory senses to detect the scent of decomposing human flesh, Migaloo detects bones hundreds of years old, and not just an entire skeleton but even tiny fragments of bone no larger than a tooth. Jackson spent six months training the Labrador mix using 250-year-old Aboriginal bones (handled with the utmost respect according to Aboriginal traditions) on loan from the South Australian Museum. The bones were placed in protective tubes with a ventilation chamber attached that allows the scent to filter through. The human remains were then buried in an impromptu graveyard/proving ground at depths ranging from one to three feet. Numerous animal bones — including kangaroo, horse, chicken, cat — were scattered around as decoys. Migaloo quickly became adept at detecting and indicating only the human bones from as far away as 20 feet, detecting even the traces of bones that had been present 24 hours earlier and then removed.

Wearing her stylish new custom-made jacket with an Australian Aboriginal Flag design, Migaloo successfully conducted her first operational find at an undisclosed location in the Queensland outback in May of this year. After searching miles of terrain and hundreds of trees for traces of historical burials, she indicated strongly on one Eucalyptus tree. The team surveyed the hollow tree non-invasively and indeed found archaeological human remains, buried inside the tree according to an ancient Aboriginal funerary practice. The bones were not disturbed by request of the traditional owners of the land.

In field tests over the next few months Migaloo again performed admirably, but it was her test on August 14th that was a record-breaker. On an Aboriginal burial ground on Yorke Peninsula in South Australia, Migaloo found four burial spots, one of them 600 years old and 8 feet underground. It has never been excavated and was known only because a post-hole digger found a bone fragment deep under the surface which was radiocarbon dated to 600 years ago. That’s a world record, as far as we know.

The oldest human remains detected by canine before now were 175 years old. In December of 1987, Candy, a chocolate Lab cadaver dog handled by legendary law enforcement dog trainer Bill Tolhurst, indicated human remains on a spot in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. The archaeologists didn’t have funding to excavate the spot at that time, but once the money came through they excavated the place Candy had pointed to and found three skeletons of men killed during the Battle of Snake Hill during the War of 1812. That record has stood until now.

Migaloo’s abilities are an exciting development for archaeologists in Australia and around the world. Candy wasn’t trained to specifically pick up archaeological remains. Her regular job was working with the police to find cadavers. If Migaloo can be trained to find human skeletal remains that are hundreds, maybe thousands of years old, she and other dogs like her will be a powerful new tool for archaeologists.

Red Centre Consultancy director Bud Streten, who owns Migaloo, plans to use her as a non-invasive way of locating and protecting traditional burial sites.

“It is a massive breakthrough, not only here in Australia but we’ve got some interest from overseas for use in other ancient civilisations.

“At the moment in the world of archaeology there is no tool that can tell you there are human remains underground, we use ground penetrating radar, magnetic susceptibility and historical or oral records.

“But now Migaloo the wonder dog can do it.”

See Migaloo perform her record-breaking feat of findery in the following YouTube video. Protip: you’ll want to turn the volume way up when Quenten Agius of the Adjahdura Land Traditional Owners Group speaks because his voice is much more quiet than anyone else’s. Follow Migaloo’s future adventures on her Facebook page.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-G2RJjZVP8&w=430]