American nature´s inventory in the collection of National Archives

The National Archives holds in its 70 km of documents, gathered over 176 years of existence, a collection ranging from the sixteenth century to the present days. In this article we highlight the theme of natural history in Portuguese America present in the funds and collections related to Luso-Brazilian history. The correspondence between the Court and the colonial authorities shows the circulation of ideas, the heavy flow of consignments of specimens, the growing importance of knowledge of the natural environment and the significance of this process in the framework of the illustrated program on the second half of the eighteenth century