The Mount Gambier tribe of South Australia, as we have already seen, divides everything in nature between two great classes, and although Mr. Stewart, who is responsible for the information, could not find any reason for the arrangement, it appears from his remarks that the natives knew to which division any object belongs. Mr. Stewart asked what division a bullock belongs to. The answer was, “It eats grass, it is Bourtwerio.” He then said, “A Crayfish does not eat grass: Why is it Bourtwerio?” but the only reply he could get was, “That is what our fathers said it was.”[362] We are now able to qualify the definition previously given of the totem as a “badge of fraternity,” or the “symbol of a gens.” We see that the totem is something more than a symbol or a badge. This description might answer for the pictorial representation of the totem, but not for the totem itself, which is regarded as having actual vitality as the embodiment or re-incarnation of an ancestral spirit. Any object is fitted for this spirit embodiment, and therefore totemism may be looked upon, not as a phase of nature-worship, but as a combination of this religion with ancestor-worship. The ancestral character of the totem accounts for the association with it of the idea of protection, which is based on the existence of a fraternal relationship between the totem and all the individuals belonging to a particular group of kin. The totem, as a badge or symbol, therefore represents the group of individuals, dead or alive, towards whom a man stands in a fraternal relation, and the protection of whom he is therefore entitled to, so long as he performs all the obligations on his part which flow from the existence of that relationship. The ideas embodied in the totem are no doubt more ancient than totemism as a developed social institution. This fact will furnish an answer to the objection that totemism is known only to peoples of a low degree of culture, who can hardly be supposed capable of rising to the conception of nature, as a whole, on which that system is founded, or the idea of a relationship existing between all the objects in nature.