[empath75]

In fact, the most wrong assumption in the entire paper is that _canals existed at all_. Any fault lines on mars wouldn't have been visible from the telescopes they had at the time. The "canals" where in fact either optical illusions or streams of dust blowing around from wind.

The primary point of the paper is to dismiss the possibility that mars was habitable which he did quite effectively with basic thermodynamics, chemistry and geology, and the secondary point was to offer alternative explanations to explain what people were observing. Those alternative explanations weren't really necessary to achieve his primary point.