  This text is the English translation, due to Naoufal Bouchareb, of an
unpublished manuscript of 1969 (the French version is available on HAL as
hal-00384928) inspired by Zariski's theory of saturation. Its publication is
justified by the fact that it appears now as a precursor of the recently
developed study of the Lipschitz geometry (for the outer metric) of germs of
complex analytic spaces. This version contains some new footnotes and an
additional bibliography.
