File:Tarphuis Lowei - John Obadiah Westwood - 498 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:

‘The smallest of the Tarphii here described [...] It is the only member of the group which I have hitherto detected out of Madeira proper,—being extremely abundant, during the winter and spring, amongst lichen in the fissures of the exposed weather-beaten rocks of Porto Santo. I first discovered it in April 1848, on the northern side of the extreme summit of the Pico de Facho ; and during December of the same year it occurred in literal profusion on the ascent of the Pico d'Anna Ferreira from the east. In Madeira it would appear to be extremely rare, although widely distributed over the sylvan districts between the limits of from 3000 to about 4500 feet above the sea. [...] During my encampment at the Lombo dos Peeegueiros in July 1850, I captured it by brushing the rank vegetation immediately outside my tent, in the dusk of the evening,—at which time its nocturnal wanderings, like those of the other representatives of the genus, may be said to commence.’