San Francisco, 1906

Agassiz in the Concrete
The Agassiz statue is the most famous of all images related to Stanford’s earthquake history (Figure 4). During the 1906 temblor, the stone shelf supporting a marble statue of Swiss naturalist and geologist Louis Agassiz on the second story of the north wall of the Zoology building (now Building 420) failed, causing the statue to plunge into the ground below. There are several accounts of the outcome. One student wrote, “A big marble statue of Agassiz was toppled off his perch on the outside of the quad and fell foremost into the ground (right through a cement walk) up to his shoulders, and still sticks there, legs in the air and his hand held out gracefully. People came running from the quad with such sober faces, but when they saw him they couldn’t help laughing, and one fellow went up and shook hands with him.”
“Agassiz in the concrete” remained a legend associated with the earthquake period. According to one account, “Many stories were told about Agassiz’s natural instinct that when the earthquake came he decided to stick his head underground to find out what was going on in the earth below and with his finger pointing saying, ‘Hark! Listen!’ […] Out of the four statues only Agassiz evidently aroused his searching curiosity.” (The other statues honored Johann Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander von Humboldt. Von Humboldt, Agassiz’s mentor, still stands next to him today, but the others were removed when the building became the Law School (Figure 5).) President David Starr Jordan wrote, “Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that ‘Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.’” What was most extraordinary about the incident was that the statue was imbedded into the ground below nearly to the hips but only broke at the nose. The nose was refastened and the statue was returned to its original place, this time better secured.

http://quake06.stanford.edu/centennial/tour/stop3.html