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Mystery Monday: let us rejoyce
By Mark Alden Branch ’86
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9:02am June 06 2022
Today’s mystery: where on campus did we find this carving? Extra credit if you can tell us who is depicted in the relief and/or the source of the inscription (“Whereat we all rejoyce”).
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Mystery Monday
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George Huthsteiner '74 TD, 4:53am June 07 2022 | 
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Mark Branch, 9:34am June 07 2022 | 
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The comment period has expired.<> Branford College. Base of Harkness Tower. Door leads to the small Gothic chapel on the first floor. <> The gothic inscription is taken from a 1716 Letter from the trustees of the Collegiate School in New Haven to Elihu Yale living in London after his retirement from the East India Company. "The affair of our School hath been in a Condition of Pregnancy...But We just now hear, that after the Violent Pangs threatening the Very life of the Babe, Divine Providence as a kind Obstetrix hath mercifully brought the Babe into the World, & behold A Man-child is born, whereat We all Rejoice." [The American College and University: A History By Frederick Rudolph, 1962 Knopf] <> I have no idea who the seated figure represents...I would guess it is the architect James Gamble Rogers, dressed in a sculptor's smock...or perhaps the prophet Isaiah.
I tip my hat! That inscription is obscure to anyone not well versed in Yale history; I had to look it up. Robert Dudley French's book on the Memorial Quadrangle identifies the seated figure as Socrates. But he doesn't mention the inscription.