Quartz with epidote

The epidote was first discovered in 1782 in Le Bourg-d'Oisans, in the French department of Isère. However, the specimens found until then had been considered a type of plover or actinolite. The French mineralogist René Just Haüy classified it as an independent species, giving it the name epidote from the Greek epidosis "addition, increase or enlargement", alluding to the characteristic crystalline shape in which one of the sides is longer than the other at the bottom of the prism. The synonym pistacite, now obsolete, has been used with some frequency.