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:

‘A truly indigenous little Cis [...] In conjunction with the Octotemnus opacus, it is perhaps one of the most abundant and destructive of all the Madeiran Coleoptera,—occurring, often by thousands, beneath the bark of the native laurels at intermediate and lofty elevations. In some of the damp sylvan districts which are difficult of access it literally teems, — undergoing its changes, generation after generation, untouched. In such positions it does not confine its ravages to the trees alone, since the fungi are equally its food,—some of the larger species of which may be occasionally observed almost alive with it. I have captured it in profusion on the Lombo das Vacas, and in the regions of the Boa Ventura and the Ribeiro Frio : and it has been taken by the Rev. R. T. Lowe in the nearly inaccessible mountain-ravine between the Sao Vincente valley and the Ribeiro do Inferno.’