It is believed that more information, coming from bibli-
ographical explorations, can initially be supplied by works that
systematically investigate “public” records and documents that
express links between the discovery of the “New Land” by Por-
tugal in 1500 until the fall of the Empire and the establishment
of the Republic in Brazil in 1889. Access to libraries, monaster-
ies, seminaries, colleges and any remnants of the “Company of
Jesus” could serve as a starting point. The Jesuits, founders of
this order, were important retainers of the remnant of our myco-
logical culture, since they remained as the mentors of Brazilian
education for 210 years until they were expelled in 1759, when
they had about 25 residences, 36 missions and 17 colleges and
seminaries, as well as smaller establishments and schools of
first letters (elementary schools), installed in all the cities in
which there were houses of the Company of Jesus (19).
At that same time, in 1755, an earthquake, followed by
a tsunami and a fire, struck Lisbon, destroying churches, hous-
es, royal palaces, markets, public buildings, theaters and the
famous Royal Library with 70,000 volumes, built since the four-
teenth century, which was turned to dust and had to be entirely
rebuilt (20). This same library, as well as the Portuguese cultural
institutions, rich sources of deposit of literary material coming
from Brazil, were plundered with the invasion of the Napoleon
troops in 1808 and with the fled of the royal family to Brazil, in
- Thousands of books of this library were forgotten at the
Belém wharf in Lisbon, which was later returned (21; 22).
Among these and other facts, involving mainly the
French, Dutch and Spanish explorers, valuable sources of refer-
ences to investigative material for the mycology area may have
been lost since the discovery of Brazil.
It seems to us somewhat premature, to use only some
data to infer about the history and origin of this science in such
a relatively old Brazil. Based on the research done it is not pos-
sible to identify an origin for this fact.
In 1565, with a privileged location, between the Hered-
itary Captaincies of São Tomé and São Vicente, the city of the
Rio de Janeiro was founded, constituting itself by conquest, the
Royal Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro.
During almost half a century, from the occupation of the
lands to the political transformations in Rio de Janeiro state,
certainly was developed an unfortunate loss of the histori-
cal wealth and the locations where the colectings were made,
mainly by the changes in the villages' names. At that time the
records of the collections and the origin of the botanical and
mycological material were made with villages names, paths,
streams, crossroads, plantations, farms, islands, ponds, mon-
asteries, ports, beaches, provinces, ranches, restingas, rivers,
mountains or with the landowner’s name. Most of these names
have changed as the properties have expanded, divided or re-
marked according to local development until they reached the
names of the municipalities, districts, communities, neighbour-
hoods, and other categories of the current Rio de Janeiro state.
Some, however, remain the same until today.However, the registration of many of these sites was well
documented in Flora Brasiliensis (23) by botanists and naturalists
collectors who, in 138 years of exploration, accurately described
their itineraries, travelled between 1767 and 1905, during the
great voyages to Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, about 82 travellers,
including 10 Brazilians, worked intensely in the colecting and
shipping of plant species to Botanical Gardens, Museums and
Herbariums, mostly from Europe. The Botanical Gardens, be-
sides serving as a “locus” of the intellectual society of that time
were centres of investigation and classification of useful and
exotic plants brought from the “New World” (24). From these col-
ectings, besides the interest of the Crown, were produced ma-
terial for study, knowledge and cultural formation in the natural
arts, strongly represented by our Flora Fluminensis (25) and Flora
Brasiliensis (26).In the same way that plants were catalogued and iden-
tified by botanical collectors, the fungi and plants associat-
ed with them began to be collected, in the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Scholars collected and prepared their herbaria
by submitting them for identification in Europe. In the majority
of reports, as a standard description of fungi species, was ob-
served the identification of the host plant and the geographical
location for each plant species (27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32). These descrip-
tions can be found, for the most part, in the publications of
German journals specialized in Mycology, such as “Hedwigia”
(since 1852) and “Annales Mycologici” (from 1901), which
contain a large volume of materials from Rio de Janeiro until
the first decade of the twentieth century (33).Since then important contributions have been made to
the Brazilian Mycology, in the form of publications of Bulletins,
Catalogs and Articles by various authors. There was an intense
activity in the area, expanding the specialized studies, mainly
in the professional qualification by governmental institutions
and by the creation of reference fungi libraries and foundation
of the Brazilian Society of Mycology.So, much beyond the simple importance on the fungi
diversity that surround us, appreciated, known or not, inter-
spersed at our Biomes environment, the Restinga ecosystem
presents not only a potential as repository of fungi present in
the environment, but of those that are hidden inside the plants,
inhabiting them and developing relationships still little ex-
plained. Even though many works have been done on Brazilian