File:Olisthopus Maderensis - John Obadiah Westwood - 484 1911.jpg

Thomas Vernon Wollaston published this drawing in his book ‘Insecta Maderensia’ in 1854. In the book he thanks Westwood for providing the illustrations, ‘Particularly, however, would I draw attention to the valuable help which I have received from J. O. Westwood, Esq., whose pencil has been so elaborately employed in the figures which I am thus enabled to attach, and by whom many of the minutest of the dissections were accomplished, — with a degree of delicacy, moreover, to which I did not myself at the commencement of this Work (though I have since succeeded in anatomizing the larger portion of them, likewise) lay claim.’

Wollaston wrote the following about this species:

‘I had for a long time considered the present Olisthopus to be identical with the O. glabratus, of Brulle, from the Canary Islands, of which indeed I still think it not impossible that it may turn out eventually to be a local state. Nevertheless, not having been able to procure specimens for comparison, and since the present species by no means answers to the short and unsatisfactory description given by Brulle in the Histoire Naturelle des Iies Canaries of Webb and Berthelot, I am induced to retain it as separate, until at any rate further evidence shall decide the point.’