I was surprised to see that On the construction of balanced incomplete block designs by [Raj Chandra Bose](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Chandra_Bose) was published (in 1939) in a journal named Annals of Eugenics (see [here](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-1809.1939.tb02219.x)) (published between 1925 and 1954).


I double checked and it [seems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_of_Eugenics) that the journal was indeed focused on eugenics and the article does not relate to eugenics or genetics in any way. So why would a mathematician decide to publish in such a journal and why was the article accepted?


It appears that there are also [other](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-1809.1937.tb02160.x) mathematics articles published in the same journal.



How come mathematicians published in Annals of Eugenics?
Eugenics and agriculture were two areas of application that motivated much of early 20th century statistics. The paper was a continuation of research on the use of Latin squares in experimental design for those areas. It says so explicitly on the second page:



> 
> It was, however, only about [1925] that the importance of
>  combinatorial problems, for the proper designing of biological
>  experiments, began to be understood, mainly through the work of Prof.
>  R. A. Fisher and his associates.
> 
> 
> 


At the time, [Fisher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher#University_College_London,_1933%E2%80%9339) was head of the Department of Eugenics at University College London.


