Slashes through note stems?

There are many abbreviations in printed music which have been used over the past 1-3 centuries to make hand-written music faster to copy out, use less ink, and allow some music to be abbreviated for ease of page turns and the like.

One of the abbreviations that often confuses the student, when it pops up unexpectedly in older printed music, is the symbol that looks like slashes through the note stems.
These slashes represent a short-hand method of indicating dividing the written pitch into repeated eighth notes, sixteenths or even 32nd notes; all played on the same pitch.

One slash through a stem means for you to divide that note value into two. Two slashes through a note stem mean to divide that note value into four. Three slashes mean to divide that note value into eight.
This picture is taken from the excellent flute method book by Alfred Brooke:


A full page pdf version of the above page from the Brooke Method for flute is here in PDF, and shows further practise samples of these note division abbreviations. The PDF version is easier to view and read.

As you will see slashes through note stems and/or dots shown above the note head indicate the same principle: Divide the note into as many repetitions as there are dots (two dots = divide in two; four dots = divide in four.)

It's interesting to note that this slash-through-stem abbreviation was a little difficult to locate in this otherwise very complete music symbol page from Dolmetsch music history, theory and music dictionary online, which is otherwise an excellent resource.
I finally located the same slash-stems explanations as found in the Brooke Flute Method on the Dolmetsch site here.

Hope this helps,

Best,
Jen