The organisation of the long descending corticofugal pathways is poorly understood. We have examined these pathways to determine the fibre relationships along the extent of their course through the internal capsule, cerebral peduncle, longitudinal pontine fasciculus, pyramid, pyramidal decussation, and dorsal column of the spinal cord. Different cytoarchitectonic regions (e.g., lateral agranular and granular) of the rat's neocortex were injected with the axonal tracer biotinylated dextran. In other experiments, each animal had different-coloured fluorescent tracers (Fluoro Ruby and dextran-fluorescein) injected into separate cortical areas. Our results show that in the anterior and posterior limbs of the internal capsule, axons arising from spatially separate sites in rat neocortex occupy distinct regions of the cross-sectional area of the pathway. More caudally, within the cerebral peduncle and the longitudinal pontine fasciculus, axons from more distant cortical areas remain largely separate, but those from adjacent cortical areas begin to overlap. By the medullary pyramid, the pyramidal decussation, and the dorsal column of the spinal cord, the representations of all the cortical regions injected overlap completely; in these structures, the axons arising from each cortical area are widely intermingled. Thus, along the rostral-to-caudal course of the corticofugal pathways, there is a change in the organisation of axons. At rostral levels, the order corresponds roughly to the spatial distribution of the cells of origin, but more caudally, this changes to an arrangement of axons that has no readily apparent order. A similar change has been observed along the course of the retinofugal pathway, where a decrease of spatial order in the fibre distribution has been associated with a reordering of axons according to their temporal sequence of outgrowth.