a€oeAgassiz in the concretea€A remained a legend associated with the earthquake period. According to one account, a€oeMany stories were told about Agassiza€™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, a€Hark! Listen!a€™ [a€¦] Out of the four statues only Agassiz evidently aroused his searching curiosity.a€A (The other statues honored Johann Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander von Humboldt. Von Humboldt, Agassiza€™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, a€oeSomebodya€"Dr. Angell, perhapsa€"remarked that a€Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.a€™a€A What was most extraordinary about the incident was that the statue was embedded 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. As amusing as this image of Agassiz was to the Stanford community, it suggested to the public that Stanford was in chaos.

quake06.stanford