Viscous seed and the defective negative

Meaning

A viscous substance or sticky matter, used to describe the constitution of generative seed. The surrounding passage argues that propagation and return to a decomposed state involve slime. Its first sentence, however, prints a negative before viscosum without a matching opening negative, producing a contradiction. The edition preserves that defective sentence. This record explains the contextual sense without pretending that the printing literally says “No animal can propagate unless its seed is viscous.”