Some of the readings proposed or preferred by Heinsius had been unnecessary or wrong, but many had been necessary to make sense of the text; and Korn is often guilty of damaging the text by excluding readings not found in B. The supreme example of this is his restoration of the manuscripts' reading iactate for laxate at ix 73.
Korn used the collation of B by Harles, which had errors and omissions (in his preface Harles had warned that his report might contain errors[13]), so that at i 9 Korn prints in istis and at x 83 perstas, without noting in his apparatus that B's false readings were ab istis and praestas respectively. He was aware that at xi 21 B read mihi, but printed tibi nonetheless, although Burman had already explained why mihi was the correct reading.
A curious feature of Korn's edition is its dual apparatus: below the report of manuscript variants is a listing of passages where his text differs from those of Heinsius and Merkel: 'Lectiones discrepantes editionum Heinsii et Merkelii adposui, ut et quantopere Ouidius Heinsianus a genuina forma discrepet dilucide perspiciatur, et quibus locis a Merkelio discesserim facilius adpareat' (xxxii). Korn ejects such obviously correct readings as leuastis at vi 44 and laxate at ix 73; in each instance the true reading is printed in large type at the bottom of the page. In addition, Korn rather unfairly included as different readings what were in fact only spellings which did not conform to the purified orthography then coming into use. Cymba does not differ from cumba (viii 28), nor is Danubium a variant for Danuuium (ix 80), nor again is Vlysses different from Vlixes (x 9). Finally, the second apparatus at several points misrepresents what Heinsius actually thought.
Korn's confusion on this point is understandable, since determining Heinsius' textual preferences is often more difficult than it might at first appear. Editions were published under his name which did not incorporate all his preferred readings[14]; even the lemmas to his notes are taken from the edition of Daniel Heinsius, and are not a guide to Heinsius' own view of the text, which can only be discovered by reading the actual notes[15]. A good example of this can be found at x 47. Here Heinsius' text reproduces the standard reading Cratesque. The lemma in his note is Oratesque, the reading of Daniel Heinsius' edition. In the note itself Heinsius indicates his preference for the conjecture Calesque, communicated to him by his friend Isaac Vossius. Here Korn, along with all modern editors, prints Calesque in his text; he reports Cratesque as Heinsius' reading.
Korn made one important conjecture in Ex Ponto IV, printing decretis at ix 44 for the manuscripts' secretis.
For the third volume of his complete edition of Ovid, published at Leipzig in 1874, Alexander Riese drew on Korn's edition, but was less radical in following the readings of B: 'nec eclecticam quam dicunt N. Heinsii nec libri optimi rigide tenacem O. Kornii rationem ingressus mediam uiam tenere studui' (vii). Riese restores Heinsius' preferred reading in only about a quarter of the places where it was deserted by Korn; even so, no editor since has shown such independence in the selection of readings.
In 1881 there appeared at London a text of Ex Ponto IV with accompanying commentary by W. H. Williams. The text, which Williams says is drawn from the "Oxford variorum edition of 1825", seems in general to be a reprint of the Heinsius-Burman vulgate with some readings drawn from Merkel's first edition. In spite of occasional conjectures and notes on variant readings, based on information drawn from Burman and Merkel, Williams is not generally concerned with the constitution of the text: his note on x 68 curasque fefelli is 'so Tennyson in the "In Memoriam'". The commentary, which is about eighty pages long, consists largely of discussions of the cognates of various Latin words in other Indo-European languages, 'though the limits of the work preclude more than the data from which a competent teacher can deduce the principles of comparative philology'. A typical note is that on i 11 scribere: 'from [root] skrabh = to dig, whence scrob-s and scrofa = 'the grubber,' i.e. the pig; Grk. γράφω by loss of sibilant and softening'. The edition has been only occasionally useful in editing the poems or writing the commentary.
In 1884 Merkel published his second edition of the poems of exile. In his previous edition he had in general followed Heinsius and Burman in the fourth book; in the new edition, without specifically saying so (although in his introduction he mentions the "codex Monacensis uetustior"), he generally alters his text so as to conform with B's readings. He does not always desert his former text, rightly retaining hanc at i 16, quamlibet at iv 45, and tempus curasque at x 67; he also keeps lux at vi 9 and domitam ... ab Hercule at xvi 19.
In his 1874 monograph De codicibus duobus carminum Ouidianarum ex Ponto datorum Monacensibus Korn had made known the existence of C. S. G. Owen's first edition of the Ex Ponto, printed in Postgate's Corpus Poetarum Latinorum in 1894, was the first edition to report this manuscript as well as B. His text is unduly partial to the readings of B and C, and his well-organized apparatus is so abbreviated as to be deceptive. It cannot be relied upon even for reports of B and C. At ix 73 it gives no hint that for four centuries editors had read laxate; many of Heinsius' preferred readings are similarly consigned to oblivion. At vi 5-6 he reports Housman's ingenious repunctuation, presumably communicated to him by its author.
In 1896 Rudolf Ehwald published his monograph Kritische Beiträge zu Ovids Epistulae ex Ponto. I am often indebted to Ehwald for references he has collected; my notes on i 15 ad summam and xiii 48 quos laus formandos est tibi magna datos could not have been written without the assistance of his monograph. This said, the fact remains that Ehwald's judgment and linguistic intuition were exceptionally poor. He had not relied on Korn's apparatus for his knowledge of B, but had collated it himself; and the intent of his monograph was to establish B's authority as paramount. A typical example can be seen at ix 71. Here FILT offer cum ... uacabit and MH have ut ... uacabit, while the reading of B and C is quod uacabit. In one of the examples Ehwald adduces, Fast II 18, uacat is found in only a few manuscripts, and it can easily be seen how it arose from uacas; all the other examples are instances of quod superest or quod reliquum est. The cumulative effect of these examples is to demonstrate that quod ... uacabit is not a possible reading. This insensitivity to the precise meaning of the passages he discusses is usual with Ehwald, and his book, although useful, is an extremely unsafe guide to the textual criticism of the poems. It has unfortunately exercised a decisive influence on all succeeding editions.